Category: Sunday sketch
Quilt pattern: Paperdrop
I’m excited to announce the release of Paperdrop, a quilt pattern that I developed in partnership with Latifah Saafir for the launch of her new HuRTy ruler.
Latifah approached me awhile ago to see if I’d be interested in designing a quilt pattern for her new ruler. Umm, YEAH! Latifah’s quilts are some of the first modern quilts I ever saw, and were a revelation to me – I had no idea there were fabrics or designs out there like that. Her work was instrumental to me choosing to pursue modern quilting. So of course I jumped at the chance to work with her.
The HuRTy 1 (there are two more in the pipeline!) makes 2:1 and 6:1 half-rectangle triangles up to 12″ high. So we got to work coming up with ideas – lots and lots of ideas – for quilts featuring 2:1 HRTs (probably the size most people are familiar with). But we kept coming back to an old Sunday sketch of mine from 2017: Sunday sketch #31.
I never made this one, because I wasn’t entirely sure how to construct it (as it’s shown in the sketch, it would require a lot of partial seams). Also, although I’ve designed quite a few sketches with HRTs, I don’t often make quilts with HRTs. I’d use the two-at-a-time construction method and get annoyed at how much fabric I’d be trimming off. But I couldn’t make large HRTs with the one-at-a-time method, because the ruler I’d co-opted for the task (the side piece from a triangle-in-a-square ruler) wasn’t big enough. The whole process was too annoying.
Paperdrop is a great design for using the HuRTy, because it requires ‘A’ and ‘B’ HRTs – in other words, HRTs facing both directions. The HuRTy is designed specifically for cutting and trimming both directions of HRT (and even for trimming off the little corner bits so you can line up your triangles for piecing). Suddenly making HRTs isn’t annoying anymore!
The Paperdrop quilt pattern is available from Latifah’s website, along with the HuRTy and two other HRT-based quilt patterns. There’s a lookbook with different versions of all the quilts, FAQs with more info on The HuRTy, videos on how to use the ruler, and more. And during launch week, there are some awesome discounts!
My version of Paperdrop uses all Kona cotton solids and was quilted by Valerie Cooper of Sweet Gum Quilting.
Head over to Latifah’s website now for Paperdrop pattern and The HuRTy ruler!
Sunday sketch #326
So, here’s a funny story… I designed this week’s Sunday sketch a few years ago, and loved it so much (SO MUCH!) that I held back on posting it so I could make it into a quilt first. Often I’ll get excited about a design and fall down a rabbit hole of fabric selecting and online ordering… and then I lose interest (it’s the paradox of choice). But with this one, I actually made it!
Here’s the sketch (check out the acid yellow!)…
And here’s the actual quilt!
It’s a little hard to tell in that pic, but I bound the quilt in the acid yellow. Thanks to Valerie of Sweet Gum Quilting for the horizontal 1/2″ straight-line quilting, which I love.
So anyway, after I bound the quilt, I packed it away so I could take a proper photo eventually… and then forgot all about it. Oops. Which is kinda crazy, cos I still LOVE this design. It’s so simple, yet it works so well with a huge range of palettes.
With a dark background…
…and a light one.
This is a 5 x 5 block layout with a 5-colour palette, and each block contains three elements (the middle square, the star arms, and the background squircle). That combination means that each colour can be used once per row and per column in each of the three elements. Although if you look closely enough, you’ll see that I had to break that rule in a few places.
Including white in the 5-colour palette means that a few stars don’t have a background squircle. I like how that opens up the design a bit and adds some negative space for the eye to rest. (The sashing between the blocks helps with that too.)
You can see that despite all the possible block permutations (3 elements x 5 colours), there are still a few blocks that are repeated in the previous versions. I tried again with the colour placement to avoid repetition, but it’s not easy! These next two versions feel a smidge ‘heavier’ to me, but maybe the larger number of unique blocks just makes the design seem busier?
Of course, you could avoid the difficulty of colour placement by using fewer colours and going with just two blocks in an alternating layout.
I also like alternating the ‘full’ star blocks with the ‘bare’ star blocks, which lightens the design a bit more.
I know I’ve only used solid colours in these variations, but I think this design is one that would work really well with prints, particularly a coordinating range of fabrics.
This week’s sketch could be made into a quilt using quarter-circle (or drunkard’s path) units, triangle-in-a-square units (or half-rectangle triangles), squares, and sashing. I know a lot of people don’t like using sashing, but I like how it opens up a quilt design and lets the blocks breathe a little. OK, that sounds weird, but basically quilts feel less crowded to me when they have sashing.
Anyway, I’m not sure I’ve ever re-made the same quilt design before, but I’m very tempted to make another one of these quilts. It was awhile ago that I made it, but I’m pretty sure it came together quickly, as there are only a few basic shapes you need to make. As usual for me, the longest part was deciding on the colour palette.
Sunday sketch #325
This design is a little like last week’s – check out those bow-ties hiding in the middle – and even a bit like Sunday sketch #314. It’s got the same vertical lines and those large half-square triangles creating diagonal lines.
I’ve coloured the shapes in a plaid-ish way, but that still leaves lots of room for variation. Changing up the colours also affects what secondary shapes emerge – although I see large diamonds in most of these designs.
This next version demonstrates the Bezold effect – the name of which I didn’t know until quilter Carolina Oneto commented on a recent Instagram post of mine. I guess it’s an effect I use often!
And here’s a different colourway. I realise as I look at this one that there’s a slight mistake in my colouring – can you see it? I didn’t colour the hot orange shapes in the same way as the others; I’ve missed filling in the small HSTs at the very tips of the shapes. I made the same mistake in the first version, too. Ah well!
This week’s designs could be made into quilts using large and small HSTs, plus small squares (next to the small HSTs). As there’s a limited palette and repeated shapes, it would suit chain-piecing (as well as methods that make more than one HST at a time).
