Category: Sunday sketch
Sunday sketch #108
I try to find inspiration everywhere. When I see an interesting shape or feature, I’ll take a photo of it on my phone or sketch it in my dot pad. I’ve also got a whole Pinterest board of quilty inspiration, along with a folder of screenshots on my laptop.
Recently when reading a New York Times Style Magazine article on couture week in Paris (why not!), I spotted a beautiful design in a short veil in Christian Dior’s autumn 2018 haute couture collection:
Such a simple idea, yet so stunning. I started playing around with it in Electric Quilt 8. I didn’t recreate it exactly, but used the idea as the basis of a cross-based, criss-crossed design. Here’s what I came up with:
In the original, the diamond shapes have a cross at every corner, whereas mine have only 2. It took me awhile to tweak the block design, but I wanted to make sure that the diagonals lined up properly, creating straight lines from one block to the next.
The design works in the reverse colourway too (and at a slightly smaller scale):
Isn’t it lovely?
These blocks could be made using a variety of squares, rectangles and triangles. Paper piecing might help to get the diagonal strips just right.
Sunday sketch #107
I think this is the first time that I’ve featured curves in my Sunday sketches. And it only took 107 weeks…!
I mentioned last week that there are a few things that Electric Quilt 8 is particular good at. There’s one more: curves! I can’t do curves with a pen and paper… at least, not very well. But they’re a cinch with EQ8.
This is one of several curvy designs that I’ve created recently. They all tend to use the double drunkard’s path block, which I really like. I want to try making one of them soon, but did I mention that I’ve only sewn one (single) drunkard’s path block in my whole quilting career…? It wasn’t pretty. I’ll need a lot of practice if I want to get better. Luckily I bought a 7″ template from Papper, Sax, Sten, which should help!
Sunday sketch #106
A few months ago, I posted a series of Sunday sketches that I designed using Electric Quilt 8 (#88, 89, 91–93). But after that, I made a concerted effort to stop designing in EQ8 for awhile and return to pen and paper. It was actually quite difficult to tear myself away from the computer and get back into a slower – but ultimately more satisfying – way of working.
I’ve struggled to use EQ8, for a few reasons. It doesn’t feel intuitive to me, so I feel like I’m wasting a lot of time searching for functionality that should be more readily accessible. I’ve also found that it’s a time suck; maybe because it’s screen-based, it’s easy to spend a lot of time playing around with it, often without many great results. Sometimes it can feel like it’s a faster way to create, but I’m never as happy with the outcomes. And even if it takes me half as long to get half as many good sketches as pen-and-paper drawing… well, it hasn’t saved me much time at all.
Having said all that, EQ8 is great for two things in particular: colour and repetition. I can tile a block in no time, and then colour it in a million different ways. This week’s sketch is the perfect example.
A 5 × 5 grid of square blocks ends up looking like 5 continuous rows of half-rectangle triangles. Carrying colours beyond the blocks also helps to disguise their edges, so you’re not quite sure where one block ends and the next one begins.
Don’t you just love this colour palette? Black, grey, white, khaki, and a dusky pink. I like how the gentleness of those colours balances out the sharpness of the triangles. I think this design would look great in some really bold colours too though. Or even some prints.
This design could be made into a quilt pattern using 3:1 half-rectangle triangles. Paper-piecing would be a really good way of achieving the precision needed to match all those points.
