Category: Sunday sketch
Sunday sketch #259
This has to be my absolute favourite colour combination at the moment. It’s so far from any colours I have around me in real life, but I really gravitate towards this palette in quilting for some reason. The warm yellow, the hot pink, the vibrant orange… I love them together.
This design actually started here…
How 80s is that?! You can see that the colour palette is the same one I used in Sunday sketch #258 – lots of bright, happy colours. And then I added the black lines – mostly because I wanted a dark colour and couldn’t find anything else that worked. All those black lines are maybe a bit overwhelming… so I tried switching them to the same colour as the background rectangle in each block. I used a grey background to differentiate the white blocks.
This is cute, but… I felt like I could make it a bit more interesting. So I tried mixing two colours per block (in addition to the white background): one for the rectangle and one for the strips. There’s a lot going on in this design, so it helps (me) to arrange the blocks facing in the same direction. I also added sashing (with the same width as the other strips) to separate all the colours.
I decided maybe that there were too many colours, so I pared the palette back to just three: my favourite mix of yellow, pink and orange. Still using two colours per block, I went back to the original design, where each set of 4 blocks creates a pinwheel / windmill effect with the strips. The sashing still helps to introduce some white space so the overall design’s not too overwhelming.
The design above is similar, but not identical, to the first one in this post. The blocks are all in the same position, but they’ve been rotated/flipped.
And using this same limited palette, I also arranged the blocks with the lines all parallel. Here’s that design with and without sashing.
The version without sashing is a bit too crowded for me, but it did give me some ideas of where to take this design next. Check out next week’s Sunday sketch for the results!
Sunday sketch #258
It was driving me nuts trying to think of what this design reminded me of, and I finally realised: Monopoly cards. Remember them? With the coloured bar across the top and the property name? I haven’t seen one in years (decades?!), but the memory of them was obviously lodged way back in my brain.
Anyway, I’m not sure what prompted this design… just another simple one that suddenly seemed like a good idea to try in EQ8, and ended up looking good enough to post.
I love all these happy colours together. It’s my usual ‘random’ layout, which is actually semi-planned and somewhat rule-based: I try to make sure that the same colour doesn’t appear twice in the same column or row. Although it’s more a guide than a rule… I can see a few places here where I broke it!
I started this design originally with black borders, which I also like. But I think I like the coloured background better… it feels a bit more fun. The black-bordered version is definitely more Monopoly-like though!
This design could be made into a quilt using large rectangles of colour and white, along with some sashing strips in a background colour. Easy peasy.
Sunday sketch #257
I had so much fun with last week’s Sunday sketch that I kept playing with those stacked flying geese.
This design is a single block on repeat. Each block has four quarters: two are all half-square triangles (in colour), and two are those diagonal flying geese (in dark grey). Rotating the blocks gives that nice back and forth motion.
The same blocks can also be rotated in other ways – with triangles facing towards or away from each other.
This week’s designs could be made into a quilt using half-square triangles (easy to make using the 8-at-a-time method) and flying geese units plus a few extra triangles. Or you could paper piece the geese shapes (a bit like you’d piece a pineapple blocks, but without cutting off the noses of the triangles). It’d be a great stash-buster or a lovely way to show off a bunch of coordinating prints.
