Category: Sunday sketch
Sunday sketch #318
I love creating block-based designs where lines from adjacent blocks combine to create new shapes. I guess that’s how secondary shapes emerge, but sometimes alternating block colouring can create secondary patterns too.
In the first version of this week’s sketch, alternating the colour placement in adjacent blocks creates a diagonal plaid effect. The colouring means that the features connected horizontally are that dark peachy-pink, while the same connected features running vertically are in light pink.
Changing the colour placement a bit eliminates the plaid effect. In the next version, both the block colouring and placement are the same (blocks are identical but every second one is rotated 90 degrees). Now light pink corners are touching dark pink sides, and vice versa.
There are enough different elements in this design that you can pick out single shapes to highlight.
Or several shapes.
Or avoid focusing on any particular shapes, and just colour all the blocks in the same two tones. That simple colouring helps to highlight those diagonal lines, too.
These designs could be made into quilts quite easily using flying geese units, squares, and triangle-in-a-square blocks.
Sunday sketch #317
I’ve been having fun with lots of basic shapes lately, and this week’s sketch is no exception. It’s another one featuring half-circles, quarter-circles and half-square triangles.
This design feels a bit celestial to me… those inner stars combined with circles that look like they’re straight out of a moon phase calendar.
There are so many minor variations possible with this design – for example, by alternating the colours of the inner stars or the half-moons.
I also like to treat some blocks differently from others. In the next version, I’ve filled in the outer half-moons for the outside blocks. This means the half-moons are only created when two octagons come into contact with one another.
And I can fill in all the internal shapes so that only the squares created from the 4 corners of adjacent blocks are white.
Or add more whitespace – this time filling in both sides of the half-moons so they become circles, and then colouring some of the stars white too. This changes the design quite a bit.
I also used that dark blue as a background for one of the earlier designs, but didn’t change the colour of the dark blocks. Now it looks like there are blocks floating in space, connected only by stars.
This Sunday sketch would be relatively easy to make into a quilt; you’d just need quarter-circles (drunkard’s path units), half-circles (if you want to save yourself making double the number of quarter-circles) and half-square triangles. And some versions don’t even use the half-square triangles.
Sunday sketch #316
I like playing with tessellations, and this week’s design is the first one I’ve posted in awhile. (Sunday sketches #296 and #297 were the last ones, I think?)
This design is based on a single block, repeated and alternately rotated.
If I colour the blocks slightly differently, you can see where the edges are.
The blocks can also be laid out on point, although I think I prefer the standard layout.
Rotating the blocks in a different way breaks up the tessellation but creates new and interesting secondary shapes.
Or they can all be arranged in the same way, but just coloured in an alternating grid to emphasise the shapes within each one.
As usual, I started with a minimal palette, but the design lends itself to a broader range of colours/fabrics.
This design could be made into a quilt using some pretty basic shapes: half-square triangles, half-rectangle triangles, and flying geese (if you want to save a few seams).
