Category: Sunday sketch
Sunday sketch #300
I’m not gonna make a big deal about this week being Sunday sketch #300, but… #300! I say it every 100 sketches or so, but I never thought this weekly habit would last this long. Thank you for following along with me!
So this week’s sketches use a motif that appeared in last week’s sketch: a square within a square. Not the start-of-an-economy-block kind of square-within-a-square, where the inner square is set on point in relation to the outer square. Just a regular small square taking up one quarter of a big square. Anyhoo…
So I decided to play with that shape some more, cos it’s kinda cool just on its own.
In these designs, I’ve laid out a 12 x 12 grid in which the square-within-a-square units alternate in rotation – half of the units have the small square in the top right, while the other half have the small square in the bottom left.
Sometimes with really simple, repetitive motifs like this, I like to crowd the design with loads of them so you start to see movement and secondary shapes and recurring lines, etc. But it’s also nice to pare them right back, so you get a really simplistic representation instead.
And then I started playing with orientation. (See my note below about the similarity of this version to the Thrive Quilt pattern from Suzy Quilts.)
And then with scale again.
And then with other types of movement.
I didn’t play with colour, but that’s obviously something else you could vary. And there are opportunities to introduce transparency by using a colour on the small squares that combines the colours of the adjacent squares.
This series of designs led to an entirely different series of related designs that I’ll post soon. Oh, and those designs led to other ones too. These are versatile shapes, and it’s really easy to make small tweaks to create large variations.
But back to this week’s designs. They could all be made into quilts using just squares and rectangles. And because of the repetition, they’d really suit chain piecing. It’s probably the sort of top you could cut and piece in a day (famous last words!).
Note: There are definite similarities between some versions of this week’s design and the Thrive Quilt by Suzy Quilts. Whereas I use a 4-patch square-in-a-square block, Suzy’s pattern uses a 9-patch that takes that block one layer further (basically surrounding a square-in-a-square with two more sides). We both alternate the blocks to create a zig-zag effect, and we both make the small squares a feature. But I started with a different orientation and I’ve used colouring in a different way (alternating adjacent blocks). Despite the similarities, I’ve posted these versions to show the iteration between last week’s designs and next week’s.
Sunday sketch #299
This week’s sketch feels like it’s related to Sunday sketch #284, but I worked on them at different times and with different starting points. But they both feature half-rectangle triangles aligned in one direction, interspersed with squares (small and large).
I really like this type of design, because having lots of different shapes means lots of lines creating movement: vertically, horizontally and diagonally. It also means lots of colouring options!
In the previous version, I’ve used colour to combine some shapes: the green shapes are a small square combined with the centre of a kite-in-a-square unit. You can see all the different shapes more clearly in the next version, where I’ve coloured them all separately.
The use of colour can create interesting secondary shapes, which can push other parts of the design to the foreground or background.
The possibilities are endless!
This sketch could be made into a quilt really easily using kite-in-a-square units, squares and rectangles. The hard part would be coming up with a palette and deciding how to use it!
Sunday sketch #298
The whole point of my Sunday sketch series is to show quilt designs, so there’s an unspoken rule (at least in my head) that all the designs should be makeable. I’ve said before that the skills required to make a particular sketch into a quilt tend to match my own sewing skills at the time I made the sketch. In other words, my ‘design’ brain is pretty aligned with my ‘making’ brain. That’s why I didn’t really design with curves until I could sew a curve, and I haven’t designed with (m)any Y-seams because I haven’t yet sewn a Y-seam. (Not that anything’s stopping me! I just haven’t got around to it yet.)
Anyway, all this is to say that occasionally, there are exceptions. I’m pretty sure that this week’s Sunday sketch is makeable – I think you could use paper piecing, start with a few partial seams, and then sew all the pieces in each block a clockwise manner around the central square, finishing off by completing the original partial seams.
I’m not excited enough by this design to bother checking whether that construction method is indeed possible (or desirable). But I can still share all the iterations!
This Sunday sketch is a block-based design using multiple half-rectangle triangles. They’re joined to each other primarily by their diagonal angles rather than their short or long edges. There are three ‘sets’ of HRTs within each block; in the top design, two of the sets are in colour and one is in white. Here’s each set coloured differently:
That can get a bit busy, so I feel like it helps to have one colour that ties all the blocks together (in this case, white) and other colours that appear more than once.
The design can also use a much simpler palette too.
Or you could use an expanded palette but stick to one colour per block (as in the first version). Here it is again, using a white background instead of the dark blue.
I’d use paper piecing to make these blocks, because I feel like the potential for wonkiness would otherwise be too high – sewing a bunch of triangles along their bias edges would be a recipe for disaster (at least for me). I’ve never tried paper piecing with partial seams though. Is that possible? I feel like it should be. It might be easier with freezer paper piecing than with traditional paper piecing. Hmm… now I want to try it!
