I’ve been designing a lot of block-based patterns lately, so prepare for a few weeks of ‘contemporary’ rather than ‘modern’! (In fairness, that’s probably true of most of my Sunday sketches.)

I love designs where adjacent blocks interact, where there’s a bit of push and pull without any actual touching. Here, I’ve accomplished that by using flying geese at the sides of two different blocks: one facing in and one facing out. As a result, adjacent blocks end up looking like they’re nesting.

The design works in a limited palette; I’ve used four colours here (including the background), but two would work too.

I prefer an expanded palette though. This next version, like the first one, uses a palette of six colours: five across the blocks and one as the background. Each block has three colours: the background (to lighten things up) plus two others. I’ve used my Sudoku colouring system here (colours feature on the outside or inside of the block once per row and column), which has led to a few blocks being repeated. I didn’t care enough to try and avoid that.

Each of the two block types would be fairly easy to make. They’re all basic shapes: squares, rectangles, flying geese, nine patches, a square-in-a-square unit. There’s no sashing between the blocks, although I have added a border to set the edges of the blocks a bit apart from the edge of the quilt. That’s my personal preference, but I know a lot of quilters don’t love adding borders.

This design feels like it should be out there already, but my internet sleuthing didn’t reveal any existing quilt patterns. If you know of a pattern that uses this design (or something like it), let me know and I’ll update this blog post!