Category: Sunday sketch
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!
Sunday sketch #347
Here are the diamonds I mentioned last week. I’ve simplified the inside of the block by removing the half-square triangles (they’re just coloured as squares now), which also removes the internal octagon. (This is all compared to the past few week’s sketches; if you’ve no idea what I’m on about, start with Sunday sketch #344 and go from there!)
This first version feels like overlapping lace to me… that circular movement, and all the dark blocks overlaid on a white background.
Making the internal stars white instead of dark blue helps to lighten the whole design, although I feel like the overlapping effect isn’t as prominent. As usual, I can’t decide which one I prefer.
And here’s a throwback to last week’s design, with the internal octagon shape back again and the diamonds coloured in the opposite way to the background.
I like how an element that wasn’t even really obvious in previous versions of this block is now the most prominent. It just goes to show the difference that colour (and colour placement) can make in a design.
I’m sure I could go for another few weeks, tweaking this design to create new sketches, but you get the idea. If a block has enough elements, you can add and subtract small components to make a big difference to the overall design. And then one design sparks another, which sparks another… ad infinitum.
I’d love to see some of these designs as actual quilts. They’d be easy to construct – they’re just half-rectangle triangles, half-square triangles and triangle-in-a-square units – and they’re all block-based, so you could batch-sew similar components and/or pieces of the same colour. (I love planning how I’ll approach a new project 🙂 )
