Category: Sunday sketch
Sunday sketch #84
I’ve been playing around with more block-based designs lately – which you’ll see over the next few weeks.
This week’s quilt design is a supersized block based on half-square triangles (with the occasional flying geese). Simple, but striking.
This design could be made into a pattern using all half-square triangles (or HSTs and flying geese, if you can cope with one partial seam per block). You could use the centre squares to highlight fussy-cut fabrics or another smaller block, but I quite like the idea of leaving them ‘blank’ to showcase the design itself (and/or your quilting).
Sunday sketch #83
If you look closely at Sunday sketch #81, you can see that the inside halves of each arrow create a closed octagon in the centre of each block. I decided to take that part of the block (which kinda looks like a circular saw blade) and tile it on its own.
Of course, that tiling brings up some really interesting secondary shapes: octagons, zig-saggy diamonds, and some wonky 8-pointed stars. It can be easier to see them if I redo the sketch with reverse shading.
I think when I sketch by hand that I pay more attention to the shapes, and see more possibilities for alternative designs and colours than I would when I use Excel or Illustrator. Instead of just creating one block and cutting-and-pasting it to get repeats, I’m re-drawing it again and again, which gives me time to think about each line and how I might manipulate it to get something new.
This design could be made into a quilt pattern using half-square triangles and squares.
Sunday sketch #82
It turns out there are many ways for a series of arrows to follow a loop… in Sunday sketch #80, the loop was kinda circular, and in #81, it was kinda square. Here’s another square-shaped block based on the same concept.
Instead of a closed octagon as the centre shape, it’s an open (that is, not fully enclosed) square. Putting the blocks together without sashing would give you offset squares at the corners, and some almost-kite shapes (paired to look like little bow-ties) along the edges.
This design could be made using half-square triangles and a few squares and rectangles.
