Some groovy retro shapes this week, to cleanse your palate (and palette!) after a few weeks of mostly traditional designs.

This week’s sketch is a super-simple design that combines stripes and curves to draw your eye around.

I started out with a fairly standard layout of curved corners meeting in the (mostly) middle. Then played around with the location of the meeting point (in the centre, off-centre…) and the colour palette.

   

I decided for the most visual impact, a two-colour palette worked best for the simpler designs.

Then I just played more with shapes – adding a square (or squircle?) and a circle.

I think a quirky design calls for a quirky palette, so back to playing with colour…

   

   

Those two squircles ended up looking like they were peering at each other. Maybe if I make them both look away?

   

   

That’s when I decided to introduce some more turns within the design.

And then removed those one-eyed squircles after all. I kinda like this off-centre, off-kilter cross on its own.

   

Of course, this is one of those designs that has a million and one possibilities. Depending on the size you wanted to make it, and how small you could go with your corner curves, there’d be lots and lots of options in terms of how many turns or layers you could fit. I’m not great at sewing small curves well, so I’ve kept my designs fairly large and not too detailed.

Making a design like this into a quilt would just require long strips and small curves. And lots of careful joining, and maybe even a bit of starch to keep things nice and straight?