I’m playing with hearts this week! It would’ve made more sense to share this one in mid-February, but I only finished it after Valentine’s Day. Well, surely love’s worth celebrating all year round! 🙂

I started with a simple heart shape, and just tiled and rotated it. It’s cute! This layout reminds me a little of fireflies or other flying bugs.

   

But of course, this shape also feels petal-y, so I had to try making some flowers. Rotating four adjacent hearts so they point inwards creates a nice flower.

But it’s maybe a bit boring in a standard layout. What about arranging the blocks on point? That feels a bit more interesting.

   

I’ve leaned on the transparency effect when colouring the orange peels in the middle of the hearts, picking a darker colour to suggest overlap between the two sides of the heart (the ‘petals’).

(Sometimes I’m in two minds about using transparency… I don’t want it to do too much heavy lifting, saving a design that would otherwise feel flat or less interesting. Ideally, the design should work well with or without the transparency. Then again, some designs just work better with it. So… I dunno? I’m trying to curb my urge to use it, but having said that, this week’s sketch has led to at least three other designs, all of which use transparency. Doh!)

Anyway, it works in a multicolour palette too (in floral colours).

So cute!

I tried rotating the blocks in other ways too, or rearranging the colours… these next two versions are also fun in their own way. I was tempted to choose one of these as the feature image this week.

   

I also tried colouring each petal in the heart block in a different colour. This feels a bit busier but also zanier (in a good way!). There’s a bit more movement. Maybe this should have been the feature image?! Arrgh I can’t decide.

Anyway, lots of potential for colour play.

   

   

   

The basic heart block is very simple: just an orange peel unit, plus two half-circles and an empty (i.e. background) square. The only challenge might be how small you can comfortably and confidently sew a half-circle. For me, it’s probably 6″ wide? (Basically two 3″ quarter-circles.) So that would mean the whole block would need to be 9″ square. With sashing and a border, that would make this design around 92″ square (yikes!). So I guess I need to get better at sewing smaller curves!

To be honest, I kinda thought there’d already be a quilt pattern like this out there. The heart block – and the overall layout – seem too cute not to have been done before. But I had a dig around online and couldn’t find anything. Emily Dennis (Quilty Love) does a new heart quilt pattern every year, but her patterns don’t use curves. There are loads of heart-y quilt patterns out there, but most seem to be based on squares and half-square triangles. Some of them group the hearts into fours (like this one), and others use a similar shape I’ve used here (without the orange peel; see the Love & Stitches quilt pattern from Megan Collins Quilt Design, for example). But I can’t see anything that incorporates the orange peel as well. As always, if you know of something similar, please tell me so I can update this post!