I seem to be on a run of thick borders at the moment. This week, I’m using Jenny Haynes’ double drunkard’s path curves as inspiration to create big fat borders on some criss-cross shapes.

Basically those big blue outlines are created using eight double drunkard’s path units plus four squares in the same width. The rest of the criss-cross (or flower?) shapes are made up using rectangles and squares. (Actually, these shapes remind me a little of overlaid Band-Aids, but let’s not go there…!)

Jenny of Papper, Sax, Sten didn’t invent these curves (I don’t think?!), but her templates have made it super-easy to sew them up. So whenever I use this double drunkard’s path shape, I think of (and try to credit) Jenny. I’ve designed with this shape a fair bit (see #514, #513, #501, #497, #491, #444, etc.) and also used it in quilts including Fizz, Quattro and Whirlwind.

As much as I love all the colour in the first version shown above, I also like to alternate the colour placement. In these next two versions, half of the shapes have colour in the centre and half have the colour on the outside (in the petals, arms, or whatever you want to call those appendages).

I also like the shapes rotated so their arms / petals / whatever are aligned horizontally and vertically rather than diagonally. And then I like tiling the shapes so they fill the space. Cutting them off at the sides adds to the impression of oversized shapes being crowded together.

This week’s sketch would be super-easy to make using Jenny’s templates. I find her 7″ templates to be a great size for quilt-making; a 9 × 9 layout of blocks makes a 63″ quilt. Or you could draft your own templates to whatever size you wanted!