This week’s design came out of the same sketching session that produced Sunday sketch #207. You can see that they use a lot of the same shapes (half-square triangles and half-rectangle triangles). Whereas Sunday sketch #207 used a single small motif repeated over and over, this design is a 6 x 6 layout of a spiky block that’s rotated up or down, creating more spiky secondary shapes.

This design could be rotated so the bands of coloured shapes extend vertically instead, but I prefer the horizontal layout. I can see the hint of diagonal lines extending between the blocks, thanks to the angles of some of those shapes. And for some reason, they’re less clear in the vertical layout (at least to me).

With a design like this, which extends to two sides of the frame (rather than all four), adding a border (like the binding on a quilt) gives a slightly different feel.

The reverse colourway also works (without binding, this time).

I was playing with this design when Libs Elliott announced the release of her latest range of fabrics, Phosphor, which is due in stores in August. It looks like a great collection of super-saturated, vibrant colours with a faint denim pattern. I downloaded the image files from Andover Fabrics and imported them into my EQ8 fabric library. Here’s Dayglow mixed with Kona Storm. This pic doesn’t do it justice!

I love working with solids and basics, so I’m looking forward to seeing these fabrics in person.

This design uses mostly half-square triangles and half-rectangle triangles, although there’s one triangle in the block that’s non-standard. Paper-piecing would probably be the easiest way to get the angles right without complicated cutting and measuring. Of course, the design could be tweaked to replace that non-standard shape with a half-rectangle triangle, but it gives a slightly different look overall, and I preferred this one. Sometimes the easiest way is not the best way 🙂