Category: Sunday sketch
Sunday sketch #350
I didn’t set out to do another basic design using a warm palette this week… but when a design uses multiple colours, I tend to gravitate to the pinks and oranges in Electric Quilt 8. I use the Kona solid colours as my default fabric library, and I guess those colours have the best mix of shades. It’s either that, or cooler blues and greens, and I was feeling warmer this week.
Anyway… I’ve spent a bit of time with quarter-rectangle triangles lately, for a few reasons. One: the release of Latifah Saafir’s HuRTy ruler, which she and I used to create the Paperdrop quilt pattern, is giving me more ideas of how to use half-rectangle triangles and quarter-rectangle triangles. And two: I’ve spent the last week or two seeing pics of Avalanche, one of the four quilts I had hanging at QuiltCon in Atlanta and which is entirely made from quarter-rectangle triangles.
In this week’s design, I’ve just set the blocks on point and coloured some of the triangles in the background colour to introduce some negative space. Otherwise it all feels a bit crowded.
Here’s a multicoloured version. There’s obviously opportunity for transparency here, but I tried not to use it too much; I like the idea of just mixing a bunch of different colours together and letting the contrast create movement in the design.
This last version reminds me a little of Sunday sketch #146 – some zig zagging, lots of angles, and a similar palette.
This week’s designs use quarter-rectangle triangles and some borders. Given the complicated colour placement, it might be easier to use paper piecing (which is how I made Avalanche), although if you were organised enough, you could probably make the QRTs the usual way without too much fuss. I haven’t used the HuRTy ruler to make QRTs yet, but I really want to!
Sunday sketch #349
A quick, cute design this week, and an excuse to talk about colour placement.
This design is set on point, and just features squares and quarter-circles (or drunkard’s path units). In the version above, the squares are coloured the same as the background, and the curves are in white, yellow, orange (light, medium or dark) or pink.
Even though each row features squares of background colour, they look like they’re two zig-zagging lines twisting round each other – like a double coil of white plus another colour. I’m not sure what optical illusion is at play here; it’s not really a transparency effect, because white plus any of these colours wouldn’t produce that background colour. But somehow the brain just seems to imagine that those squares are connecting the curves on either side to create a long, winding coil.
The design works horizontally too.
And in a more limited palette.
The design doesn’t have the same effect with a different colour placement though. Below I’ve used different placement in each row, and you can see how it changes the whole effect – in some places, the transparency is there but less effective; in other cases, it’s gone completely, leaving quite a clunky design in its wake.
The first row above features a transparency effect: the white and red zig-zags overlap in pink squares, which makes sense. I feel like it’s a bit ‘heavier’ than the second row. The third and fifth rows lose that effect completely, and feel very clunky (and boring) to me. The fourth row retains the zig-saggy feel (for the most part), but using red to colour in the squares where the white and pink ‘overlap’ doesn’t quite work, so feels a bit wrong.
So anyway, if a pattern featured a design like this, I think it would be important to tell people how the overall effect might change with different fabric placement. Something that looks great on paper might end up looking very dodgy in fabric if you weren’t careful.
Of course, the same design can be coloured completely differently, to avoid any of these problems 🙂
These designs could be made into quilts by arranging squares and quarter-circles (or drunkard’s path units) on point. The last version uses half-square triangles instead of squares. All fairly straightforward!
Sunday sketch #348
Something new this week, after a few weeks of (mostly) the same thing.
I started thinking of these little shapes as knots, but the more I played with them, the more they reminded me of little cross-stitches. So I re-coloured them as if the same thread was winding its way across a canvas.
Of course, cross-stitching doesn’t use a different colour thread for the bottom and top stitch, right? So here’s each stitch in its own colour. Somehow this doesn’t feel as cute to me. Maybe I should’ve put that pale pink back in.
I had a bit of trouble with this design, and I would’ve liked to keep playing with it but I got too frustrated. The block is actually set on point – it’s much easier to design with the curves at the cardinal points of the block (north, south, east and west) than in the four corners; then the straight black lines can be horizontal or vertical (depending on which way the block is rotated).
But setting the blocks on point means you get whitespace at the four corners (which is what makes up those empty spaces between the blocks). If I wanted to recreate a cross-stitch-like design, I’d have the blocks in a straight grid with only a bit of sashing between them. But that would mean redesigning the block so it fills a normal square… which would mean redrawing it rotated by 45 degrees. And for some reason, recreating the curves on the diagonal and getting them the right size was just too hard for me. There might be a way in Electric Quilt 8? But I couldn’t find it. Using the ‘Serendipity’ features didn’t work. Even grabbing the whole design and trying to rotate it didn’t work. I dunno. I’m sure there’s a way, I just haven’t found it yet.
It’s annoying to have a design in my head that I can’t get down onto paper (or the screen). I’ll come back to it one day!
