Category: Sunday sketch
Sunday sketch #102
I think of my sketches as being two-colour, even thought it might be more accurate to call them monochromatic – I usually use one pen (black, more often than not) and then rely on the paper itself to act as the second ‘colour’.* Apart from making my life a bit simpler, two-colour sketches help me to focus on the design itself rather than get distracted by colour.
Another benefit of two-colour designs is that they’re great for playing with reverse colourways. It’s much easier to create a design and then incorporate its opposite.
This design reminds me of zippers or tire treads. Depending on how you look at it, it could be white on black or black on white. Even though it looks like the top and bottom parts of this sketch are in reverse colourways, they’re not; only the direction of the ‘zips’ is different.
This design could be made into a quilt pattern using half-rectangle triangles and vertical sashing, or long columns of angled strips.
* I know, I know: black and white aren’t colours. But you know what I mean.
Sunday sketch #101
The repeating shape in this week’s sketch reminds me a little of a churn dash block: it’s got a square in the centre, half-squares around the outside, and lots of sharp points poking out in all four directions… but it’s also quite different.
The repetition of the units also creates fantastic secondary shapes inside. So much movement! I wanted to see how else I could use the same block, so I tiled it normally.
Depending on which way the blocks were made, the repetitive unit could be an X or an (angular) O block. Alternating colours help to differentiate the blocks:
But isn’t it interesting how the block design disappears behind those small squares at the junction between 4 blocks? Those secondary shapes really come to the foreground and push the coloured pieces to the background. It looks less like the sides of each block are a really interesting shape, and more like they’re just straight rectangles overlaid with small squares. What started out as an edgy, quirky block in the top design now isn’t so eye-catching!
These blocks could be made easily using rectangles and triangles. Since a lot of the cutting might be on the bias, you could paper-piece for accuracy.
Sunday sketch #100
Can you believe I’ve made it to 100 Sunday sketches?! Almost two years of consistently posting a new quilt design, week after week… wow. Thanks for following along!
A few weeks ago, Sunday sketch #95 featured big stars enclosing the traditional sawtooth star quilt block. I like the idea of creating a traditional block almost inadvertently through the placement of other pieces in a quilt design. So I pursued that direction for awhile, and came up with this week’s criss-cross design.
Overlaid crosses create the sawtooth star in the middle of each block. There are lots of ways to colour this design to emphasise different parts.
This design would be fairly easy to translate into a quilt pattern using squares, rectangles and triangles.
