I’ve spent most of my life in Australia, but Christmas time still makes me think of winter and snow rather than summer and sunshine. It’s probably partly (or mostly?) due to being inundated with American pop culture for so long. Anyway, I’ve been playing with the concept of snowflakes lately, so here’s a sixfold-inspired design!

I don’t think I’ve designed with equilateral triangles before, but I finally figured out how to use this layout in Electric Quilt 8. (The triangles aren’t perfectly equilateral, but close enough.)

Because each larger shape that encloses a six-pointed star touches six others, I needed a palette of at least three colours (otherwise adjacent shapes would meld into each other). Rather than filling the full ‘canvas’ with these larger shapes, I decided to leave some empty spots. As the background colour is one of the three colours, some of the stars look like they’re just floating in space amongst larger shapes – but really, they’ve got their own chunky borders as well, you just can’t see them 🙂  If I changed the background colour, it would change which stars appear to float.

I tried a bunch of three-colour designs, many of which I really like!

   

I also like this design in different shades of the same colour.

   

And of course, with any three-colour palette, there’d be six possible colour arrangements (3 × 2 × 1). I think this design works just as well with a light, mid or dark background, although more transparency seems to happen with the light and dark backgrounds.

   

It’s also possible to have a different background colour in different areas of the design. Below left is the same version of this design in a new palette; below right, I’ve used yellow as the background colour on the left-hand side of the design and kept the pink as the background on the right-hand side. See how some previously floating stars are now enclosed, and other stars are newly floating?

   

So, making this design into a quilt would require lots of triangles! Some small, but the background areas could be made with larger triangles (or squares and rectangles, if you really wanted to). It would also require a fair bit of points matching (if you’re into that sort of thing). I am tempted to make this one, cos I think it’s really cute (particularly the very last version), but I’m not sure how I feel about piecing so many triangles. I’ll let you know if I decide to try it…!