Like Sunday sketches #481 and #482, this week’s sketch is a block-based design featuring one main motif: a two-layer economy block surrounded on all four sides by a small square on point. The small squares are shared between adjacent blocks, and there’s potential to change things up through colour placement and by adding different shapes in spaces between blocks.

When filling in empty spaces, I’ve limited myself to using what I call ‘coherent’ shapes – that is, shapes whose lines match the lines already in the design. So, for example, horizontal and vertical lines, or 45-degree lines (the kind you find in half-square triangles, flying geese and economy blocks), but no curves or half-rectangle triangles. Using coherent shapes means your eye can travel across and around the design seamlessly, without being interrupted by lines that don’t make sense in the context. Basically any new shape that’s introduced has to have lines that are parallel to lines already in the design.

How about I just show you instead of banging on?

I started out with this design, and almost used this as the feature design this week, but decided it was too close to Sunday sketch #481. But I like the simplicity of it, and the different colour placement.

But see how easy it is to change the overall look/feel of the design by just altering one or two things?

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

These designs are all fairly traditional, but I think there are useful lessons here for applying to modern quilt design. I haven’t played with scale – changing up the size of the blocks, for example – but I think that could work really well here too (all the lines would stay parallel/coherent, after all). I can just remove some blocks maybe…

Or parts of blocks…

Or introduce some asymmetry…

And so on and so forth. The possibilities really are endless.

Anyway, you can look at this week’s sketch in the context of #481 and #482 and see how small tweaks can make a big difference. Which is a feature of quilt design that I mention often, but it never ceases to amaze me!