I’ve been hopping back and forth between a few related designs lately, and while this week’s sketch didn’t evolve directly from a previous idea, it was inspired by Sunday sketch #468.

I’ve used that grid-within-a-grid-within-a-grid approach again, with a few minor changes.

I started out with square blocks laid out in a 5 × 5 standard grid. Each block is a solid colour overlaid with what looks like most of a granny squares block set on point. In reality, I’ve just cut off the four corners of a 25-patch checkerboard within each block, making the outer 8 dark squares into half-square triangles. The smaller triangles that seem to make up the four corners of the granny squares blocks (that is, the diagonally set dark squares) are really just quarter-square triangles set into the sashing that separates the blocks.

If I change the colouring slightly, removing the corners of each block, you might get a better sense of where the blocks begin and end, and how the sashing contributes those smaller corners.

   

And then I just played around with different colour arrangements within each block and in the sashing.

   

   

I decided to rotate everything so that the coloured squares were set on point and the edges of the checkerboards/granny square blocks were running horizontally and vertically.

   

I chose a white background as a default for this design, then was too lazy to go back and redo all the versions in a different palette. Generally I try to avoid using white as a background colour in actual quilts – it just introduces too many issues that annoy me (coloured fabric showing through, trapped threads, propensity to show up stains). But sometimes it helps a palette pop in sketches!

I think this design could work with a dark fabric as the background too.

OK, I quickly tried another palette just to show you how mid-range colours would work as a background too. I sometimes forget that I don’t always have to go with light or dark… I can find a happy medium.

   

   

I like how in some arrangements, the sashing seems to pop more than in others.

So to make this week’s sketch into a quilt, you’d just need to make 25-patch blocks (in which 8 of the 25 squares have been replaced with half-square triangles) and piece some quarter-square triangles into the centre of each length of sashing. You might also want to put coloured squares at the points where the sashing pieces meet (between the corners of adjacent blocks).

You could leave the whole arrangement in a standard layout or rotate everything 45 degrees for an on-point layout. The latter would then require setting and corner triangles to complete. (Robert Kaufman has a good app for figuring out the size of squares to sub-cut for setting and corner triangles.) I’ve also added a border around my versions so that nothing’s touching the edges of the quilt. I like things to have a little room to breathe. 🙂