Category: Sunday sketch
Sunday sketch #331
This week’s Sunday sketch is inspired by art that I saw on Twitter. I follow a few accounts that serve up wonderful art every day – images of paintings or other creations and the people behind them. My favourites are @MenschOhneMusil and @womensart1.
PL Henderson, the art historian who curates the #WOMENSART feed, posted a series of works by Ukrainian-French artist Sonia Delaunay in early October. The image of 1920s-1930s clothing designs caught my eye. Those shapes and colours!
I’m embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know much about Sonia Delaunay or her work. She combined abstract geometric shapes and bold colours in art and fashion. And she was a quilter! Well, she made at least one quilt, a process that apparently prompted her to change the direction of her art practice.
Anyway, it seems fitting that I’d be inspired by one of her designs. If you check out the image of the clothing designs on Twitter, you might spot which dress sparked this idea.
Delaunay’s sketch of a dress design uses a quarter-square triangle for the bodice and two squares flanking a triangle for the skirt. I created the same shapes and linked them in columns with another quarter-square triangle added in-between; that let me ensure that the ‘skirts’ in adjacent columns didn’t interfere with each other.
In the next version, I coloured the ‘skirts’ differently from the bodices and extra quarter-square triangles. You can see that I inverted the shapes in alternating columns.
Because there are so many shapes, there are lots of other possible variations in colour placement. This next one is perhaps a bit heavy in this colourway. But sometimes it’s fun to play, just to see if any new ideas emerge.
I also tried two shades of a single colour, which also looks good, I think. This approach also makes it clearer to see secondary shapes and other apparitions emerge from the design. I feel like there are a few serious dogs (or bears?) wearing shades in this version. (Can you see what I mean, or do I sound like I’ve lost my mind?)
There are a couple of ways this design could be made into a quilt. You could create a bunch of quarter-square triangles and lay them out in columns, separated by columns made of flying geese and squares laid vertically. Or you could set the whole thing on point, and use squares and half-square triangles instead. I think it’d be pretty easy once you got started.
If you want to read more about Sonia Delaunay, check out this profile in the Guardian, published to accompany an exhibition at the Tate Modern in 2015, and a more recent article from this year, in Daily Art Magazine.
Sunday sketch #330
I made one more addition to last week’s block. There’s now a curve running diagonally through it; the two quadrants of the block with the half-circles now have a larger quarter-circle too, which connect to create a curve that extends across the block. And makes the whole design very groovy.
These designs remind me of those swirly endpapers that you sometimes see in old books. Or the designs you can make with water marbling. They might be a bit over the top for a quilt, but I couldn’t resist playing anyway.
Here’s the same block, just rotated.
I used these colours because I recently finished making a quilt with a similar palette (but a less psychedelic design). I think they work here though! Very in-your-face, but in a good way.
These designs could be made into quilts using curves, curves and more curves. Some smaller, some larger. I always use templates for cutting/piecing curves; my favourites are Jenny Haynes’ (which you get find here), because her cutting templates are oversized. That means any dodgy sewing doesn’t really matter (like my complete inability to match up the beginnings and ends of the convex and concave pieces), because I can just trim the units down to the perfect size later using her squaring template. Game-changer!
Anyway, this week’s Sunday sketch is the last in a series of four related sketches that all use blocks featuring those small, diagonally placed semi-circles (or half-circles) and another element (or two). It’s fun to see how little tweaks can have such a big effect!
Sunday sketch #329
The curvy pinwheels are still going strong… once again, they’re the main feature in this week’s Sunday sketch. But instead of diagonal lines, each block has two curved lines (moving in the same direction as the HSTs in Sunday sketch #327). So now we’ve got some tropical flowers!
Colouring adjacent blocks creates the flower shapes, with one of the two half-circles in each block contributing to the centre pinwheel. I find that colouring in the pinwheel itself helps to ‘anchor’ the four blocks together; leaving them all the same as the background colour gives a different feel, I think (although I still like it). All the dark pinwheels in this version keep my eye moving too much; it takes me too long to decide where to rest my gaze.
I also alternated the colouring to feature the flowers and then just the pinwheels. I could’ve maybe done a larger layout of this one to show off the design a bit better (and to get rid of that annoying thin line running along the right side and bottom of the image… that’s an artefact of exporting a PDF from Electric Quilt; it happens occasionally and it bugs me).
Anyway, this week’s design just needs curves – and lots of them. Large quarter-circles and smaller half-circles (which you could make using two smaller quarter-circles, or drunkard’s path units).
This design might work well with some large-scale floral prints? I am a big fan of kitschy floral prints, so maybe this is the design my secret stash has been waiting for??
