Category: Sunday sketch

Sunday sketch #359

This week’s sketch(es) remind me a little of Sunday sketch #296 – they’re both tessellations of a curvy shape with a star in the middle.

Whereas Sunday sketch #296 relied mostly on half-circles, this week’s shape uses quarter-circles or drunkard’s path units. Here I’ve used palette of three colours.

But two also works….

Or more than two. (With a busier palette, I often like to use one colour for a single element of all the blocks for a bit of consistency: here I’ve used white.)

You can get a better idea of the basic building block from this next version, where I’ve used a single colour (plus background colour) per block. The ‘reverse’ tessellated shapes (the ones that are mostly background colour) are made from the corner elements of 4 adjacent blocks.

This week’s designs use a 4 × 4 block in a standard layout, and each block is made up of quarter-circle/drunkard’s path units, plus a few orange peel units. The precise number would depend on your preferred layout, of course.

This is by no means a completely original shape; I’m sure it’s out there already in quilt land. I haven’t saved anything like it on my Pinterest board of curvy quilts, but that doesn’t mean it’s not out there. If you know of a quilt pattern based on this shape, let me know and I’ll update this post!

 

Sunday sketch #358

This week’s sketch is one of those rare designs that I’m not entirely sure how to construct. But it’s still cute enough to share!

I’ve treated the alternating crosses like two different layers overlapping each other, and coloured them accordingly. That presents lots of opportunities for different palettes.

All the crosses could be coloured the same, of course. And the circles don’t necessarily need to be completely filled.

But filling the circles makes them more prominent, changing the overall feel of the design.

This week’s sketch is made up of circles (comprising 8 sectors of equal size) and squares. I really don’t know how I’d make this one. How would you join the sectors to the adjacent cross pieces? I guess you’d have to use templates and probably partial seams? It might be easier for hand-piecers rather than for machine-piecers? Part of me wants to try it just to see if it’s possible (which I’m sure it is), but the other part of me knows I have many more (easier) sketches to make first 🙂

Sunday sketch #357

I’ve found that one of the easiest ways to iterate a design is to replace one shape with another. This week’s sketch is based on Sunday sketch #356, but it uses squares instead of drunkard’s path units. Those interlocking shapes are still there (see the second version, below), but now they look like flags rather than crochet hooks.

In the first version though, I’ve rotated the blocks to obscure those interlocking shapes.

Here’s the version most like last week’s sketch. I’ve used a palette of three colours (my usual choice of dark blue, bright orange and pale pink), but the layout is such that each colour can still be used for both a ‘positive’ (or foreground) and ‘negative’ (or background) motif.

I like this version, but I wonder how it would look if those diagonal stepwise blocks of colour between the motifs were reduced in size. The sketch is block-based, so I’d have to revise the block itself or just rework the whole design. It would make the whole sketch a bit busier, but I think it could be more interesting. It’s not something I thought about doing at the time, but now that I’m writing this blog post, I can see potential for improvement. I’ll work on it!

This week’s sketch could be made using squares (large and small) and rectangles. And lots of chain piecing!