Category: Sunday sketch
Sunday sketch #188
As promised, more quarter-square triangles this week.
This is obviously a really simple design that keeps half of the quarter-square triangle unit as a solid colour, using three colours per unit instead of four (with one of the colours being white in this version). Then the units are grouped into 3×3 blocks. This combination of colouring and arrangement limits the busy-ness of the QSTs and helps to maintain some continuity between the units and blocks.
The design also works in a more limited palette.
This design could be made into an actual quilt using only quarter-square triangles.
When you make QSTs, you make two at a time, and those two are mirror images of one another. If you’re only using two colours, you’d hardly notice, because you simply rotate them and they look the same. But if you’re using more than two colours, it can be a pain if you have a design in which all QSTs need to look the same (because half of them will look like mirror images). In the top design, I’ve accounted for that by using both groups of blocks. For each QST colour combination, there are two blocks; both have the big white triangle at the bottom, but the two colours on top switch sides. I didn’t do that in the bottom design – I just coloured that one quickly, without much thought – but it could be rearranged slightly to make sure that there’s less wastage. Then again, you could always set aside unused blocks and make them into another quilt!
Sunday sketch #187
I went to a concert recently and started daydreaming about quarter-square triangles as I listened to the music (as you do). As soon as I got home, I started playing with EQ8. I didn’t end up with the original design that I’d imagined, but I managed to create many more. Here’s the first series.
I almost always start with a two-colour quilt, try the reverse colorway, and then can’t decide which one I prefer.
The four quadrants of this design lend themselves to four colours too. And with such a happy design (well, it feels happy to me!), it’s hard to avoid my usual colour scheme of yellow, orange, red and pink.
The design also looks super-cute in a radiating rainbow-ish colour scheme.
I also tried the mixed-up version, which highlights the structure of the QST blocks. It’s a bit busier/messier than the previous designs, but I don’t mind it. I think it would look nice in a really gentle palette.
And finally, another way of colouring the blocks using only three colours instead of four (or two). You can vary the movement around the quilt design by changing which side of the QST is a large solid triangle (pink) and which is a pair of smaller triangles (blue and white).
These designs could all be made into quilts using quarter-square triangles and a few squares. If for some reason you don’t like QSTs, you could use half-square triangles and squares on point, with triangles to fill in the gaps at the edges.
This sketching session produced loads more designs along similar themes, so look out for more QSTs in the coming weeks!
Sunday sketch #186
I love designing block-based quilts, and I love it even more if I can design a block with borders that aren’t visible. In other words, you can’t easily tell where one block ends and the next one begins. That sort of ‘borderlessness’ usually requires colour / fabric to provide a bridge between blocks. I was happy with how Northern Lights (which I renamed ‘Cloudburst’ for QuiltCon submission) achieved that, but I’m still try to recreate the effect.
This week’s two-colour design uses a single block repeated 16 times. They’re all coloured in exactly the same way, but every second one faces the opposite direction (i.e. rotated 180 degrees from the ones next to it).
The design ends up looking a bit like a DNA helix on an angle, with the positive and negative spaces taking on a similar form.
Using different colours for the blocks helps to show the borders between them.
Like Northern Lights / Cloudburst, this design would probably be easiest to make into a quilt using paper piecing to get the accuracy needed.
