When I’m designing quilts, one of the most important aspects of a sketch is how it makes me feel. Not about how easy it might be to make, or who it might appeal to, but how I feel when I look at it: Indifferent? Bored? Surprised? Delighted?. This week’s sketch is the sort of simple, fun design that makes me very happy. The sort of design I’ll stumble onto and think “ha!”. And then I’ll keep going back to it, because it makes me smile 🙂

You might be able to tell how last week’s bird block inspired this one – it uses the same large curve (although extended all the way round the block, rather than just featuring in the bottom half) and a corner of orange peels (4 in this case, instead of 3 in the bird). Coloured in red, they instantly reminded me of tomatoes!

Or green tomatoes…

Or a mix of red and green…

Or oranges…

Or apples (using only 2 orange peels instead of 4)…

I tried replacing the large corner curve with a square to make a lemon… hmm, I’m not sure that really works. Maybe a strawberry, if I use a dotted red fabric?

   

Let’s get back to the rounder fruits. Maybe some apricots?

And finally, some kind of unidentified fruit, just because I wanted to use this colour 🙂

These designs use large quarter-circles and smaller orange peels to create a round fruit-like shape. The slight difference in the curve circumference between the quarter-circles and the orange peels creates a sort of dent in the middle, like the one that fruits have where they join the stem. I’ve changed up how many leaves (or orange peel units) they have, but it’s all a bit made up. I think the shape is evocative enough without getting too technical about the details!

I have a lot of orange and yellow solid fabrics in my stash, so I’m very tempted to try and make one of these; I think it would be a quick make (assuming I can deal with the orange peel units easily enough – I’ve never actually tried one…?!). And it just feels fun and makes me happy to look at. Although I love the tomato version the most… hmm, I wonder how many red solids I have?

I tried to do a pretty deep dive online to see if anyone else had used this shape before for a fruity quilt (let’s not get into the debate over tomatoes being a fruit vs a vegetable). I couldn’t find any (let me know if you do!), although there are loads of apple-y and tomato-y quilt patterns out there!