Some wriggly, squiggly fun to start off 2026 – Happy New Year!

I’ve been playing a lot with Irish chain designs recently, and this is just one variation. The Irish chain is a classic traditional quilt design featuring a checkerboard of plain squares and nine-patches. The smaller squares in the nine-patches connect diagonally across the design in both directions. You can read more about Irish chain designs (and see some pics) on Barbara Brackman’s blog.

Anyway, I’m interested in filling the blank squares in Irish chain designs with other stuff. Here, I’ve used a double-curve block (below left). You can kinda see where the nine-patches begin and end if I colour some of them ‘wrong’ (in the reverse colourway; below right).

   

(An iteration of the ‘wrong’ version might be a good starting point for a modern quilt.)

Anyway, I was happy to stick with this fun repetitive design. I tried a multi-colour palette with the colours mixed up (which is the first version I’ve shown above), but also tried using one colour per ‘noodle’ (for lack of a better word). The former adds a bit of chaos; the latter adds a bit of regularity.

I’m also really smitten with the two-colour version (but I’m always smitten with this light-pink/hot-orange colour combo). And although I like the empty squares, they’re also perfect for adding another pop of colour.

   

Depending on the colour placement, the coloured squares can lean into the transparency effect (above left) or just avoid it (above right).

That’s where I ended things when originally designing this sketch – I was completely happy with these versions! I know they’re super-simple, but they just feel fun. Sometimes that’s all I’m after with a design.

But then Tara Glastonbury (Stitch & Yarn) was looking to add more curvy quilts to her latest exhibition, ‘Ahead of the Curve’, so I showed her some of these designs. I played around with them a bit more, for a couple of reasons. First, none of the previous designs is really ‘modern’ (although we can all argue about what that term really means)… I knew I could tweak them to make them a bit more interesting. And second… I didn’t actually know how I’d construct the double-curve blocks. The 7 × 7 layout above has 24 double-curve blocks. That’s a lot of blocks to make in a short space of time when you don’t yet know what you’re doing!

So I made a few small changes: removing a few blocks and replacing others with rail-fence blocks, which reduced the number of double-curve blocks to 12 (phew!). I like this version a lot…

…but ultimately decided to lean into the curvy feel by subbing in a few more single-curve blocks (which I’ve used before, and can confidently sew). Here’s what the resulting quilt, Fizz, looks like:

So, I’m glad I had some curvy designs to choose from when Tara asked if I had any other quilts that might be suitable for her exhibition. I’m also glad I had drunkard’s path templates from Jenny Haynes (Papper, Sax, Sten), which I used for both the single- and double-curve blocks. You can read all about Fizz in a separate blog post. All the stars aligned for this one!