Did you ever play with stickle bricks as a kid? Those plastic bricks with interlocking bristles that you can use to build stuff. I don’t think I ever had any, but as soon as I created this week’s sketch, they were the first thing I thought of.

I love creating designs where adjacent blocks interact in interesting ways – maybe part of one block completes a shape in another block, or two blocks create a secondary shape between them. In this week’s sketch, I’ve used long extensions (I’ll call them ‘bristles’) to reach out from one block into the adjacent spaces.

I tried different lengths and widths of bristles, and spent a long time trying to decide which I preferred. In the end (today, at least), I think I like longer ones better. But shorter ones are cute too.

    

I also played around with how the bristles on adjacent blocks interact: do they interlock fully or only partially? I tried fully interlocking first, which reveals the background colour only at the corners of the blocks.

That version reminds me a little of Sunday sketch #332, which was the basis of my quilt Tetrapacked:

(I omitted some of the blocks and ‘bristles’ to introduce some negative space in that sketch/quilt, but the underlying designs are similar in that they both use blocks that fully interlock.)

I wanted a bit more negative space in this week’s sketch, so I tried a version in which the bristles only partially overlap.

I find that a bit busy though; I could reduce the busy-ness by eliminating some of the bristles, but I still don’t love how they look when they do interlock.

I tried a bunch of different bristle lengths and overlaps, but couldn’t find anything I loved.

Instead, I tried alternating the blocks, which I like a lot. The ’empty’ blocks (without any bristles) end up looking like they’re framed by a brighter square of the background colour. I like how these versions (in two colours and five colours) show off the bristles without being too overwhelming.

But ultimately, after all my playing, I ended up preferring one of the most basic versions, where alternating blocks are coloured as the background. I added another layer of bristles to add some visual interest and make it seem like the internal shapes might be cutouts instead of blocks laid on the background.

   

This week’s sketch would be easy to make into a quilt: it’s all squares and rectangles (or skinny strips). I’d really like to try an improv version of this design, without using any rulers – I think a bit of wonkiness could add another layer of visual interest to an otherwise simple design.