Heading off in a new direction with this week’s sketch! It’s loosely related to some other stuff I’ll post in the coming weeks, but for now I’m considering it a standalone design. It’s kinda kooky, but fun.

I won’t walk you through all the designs that led me to this one, but I’ll show you the evolution of the block (see the pic below).

Row 1: This star shape features in another design that I’ll share soon. I liked it enough that I figured it deserved its own design! But on its own, it’s kinda boring.

Row 2: I coloured in the square behind the star. Still not interesting enough to warrant a whole design.

Row 3: I changed the squares to circles. Slightly more interesting, but not very ‘sensible’ – and by that, I mean that the circle doesn’t feel like it makes sense in this context. I’ve combined two quite different shapes, and they’re not doing anything for each other.

Row 4: I added a corner to the circles. The introduction of those straight lines and sharp points kinda echoes things happening in the star, so this teardrop shape makes more sense than a circle. This is worth exploring!

Row 5: I added a centre circle. Apart from lightening up the whole block, the small circle echoes the larger curves. Yay! Now this is a shape I can play with.

You can see in these next two versions what a difference the introduction of that centre circle makes. It lets me bring in some empty space (i.e. background colour) into the centre of the block, while also echoing the curves of the outer shape.

   

So now that I’ve settled on my preferred design, I can play around with colour(s). A three-colour palette works well, although I’ve tried a larger (five-colour) palette too.

   

   

   

So far, I’ve coloured the star differently in each block and used the centre circle as the shared colour (same as the background colour) across all blocks. But I also like the effect of making the star the shared colour, with the centre circles coloured in the background instead. The stars really pop out in this version (and they give me slight Clockwork Orange vibes.)

Previously I left the inner circles ’empty’ (that is, coloured the same as the background), but I also tried leaving the star empty instead. This lightens the whole design even more.

   

Or all the teardrops can be the same colour, and the stars and centre circles can change.

   

So, I was all set to finish things there. But often when I’m writing up a Sunday sketch blog post, I’ll look at all the images again and see new ways of doing things or come up with new ideas for tweaks. In this case, I wondered about filling in the opposite corners of the blocks, changing the teardrop shape into a leaf shape….

Gahh! I really like it! The addition of some sharper corners echoes some of the points in the internal stars, and spreading the colour across the block helps to connect diagonally adjacent blocks.

   

   

So then I had a dilemma – stick with my original featured sketch, or substitute it for this one? I love both designs, and I’m honestly not sure which one I’d make if I had to choose one. I think this leaf shape is underrepresented in quilting. I haven’t used it nearly enough myself: it (or something like it) only makes an appearance in Sunday sketches #419, #375, #374, #363 and #321… which, out of 500+ designs, is not that many. Clearly it’s a shape I need to bring out more often!

But then again, I think that teardrop shape is underrepresented too (in my designs, and in quilting more generally). And I feel like the teardrop kinda matches the whimsical weirdness of this week’s sketch a little more than the leaf shape. That’s not something I can adequately explain; it’s just the way I feel when I look at these designs. It also means I don’t need to rewrite this blog post 🙂

Making this week’s sketch into a quilt would require triangle-in-a-square units, kite units, and some curves. I might appliqué on the small centre curve (or you could do an inset curve), but I’d probably piece the larger outer curves. So you could piece the stars into full squares, then cut the curves into the corners and add the concave pieces in the background colour. It would be a slightly complicated make, but nothing too onerous, I don’t think.

I’ve tentatively added this to my ‘To make’ list… although that changes often (almost weekly!), so who knows if I’ll ever get around to it. But I will try hard to incorporate more leaves and teardrops in future sketches!