One of the most fun parts of quilt designing for me is seeing how a small tweak can have such a big effect. This week, I perked up a fairly basic design by changing squares into rectangles.

I mean, the end result is not earth-shattering. But I like how the rectangles – which are almost squares, but not quite – just make this design slightly more interesting than if it relied on squares instead. It’s a tessellation of two shapes (each of which appears in two colours), only because the slight elongation of the squares into rectangles means that one shape is a wee bit longer/narrower while the other is shorter/wider.

Colour placement makes a real difference here. The transparency effect is pretty much a non-negotiable, otherwise the whole design ends up feeling fairly flat.

This one would be fairly easy to make into an actual quilt: it’s all rectangles. Some big, some small. It could be strip-pieced (so maybe jelly roll-friendly?) or just pieced in a standard way. It might work well as a scrappy quilt, as long as you used distinct colours that didn’t blend too much; otherwise I think things could end up looking messy quite quickly.