Category: Sunday sketch
Sunday sketch #242
This week’s series of designs is all about retro windmills. And pinwheels. Can you say that ten times fast…?
I came up with this design very quickly in EQ8. I started with an idea of adding a curve to a half-rectangle triangle (why not?), and then playing with placement. I made a square block with two of those shapes facing each other, then repeated them, and rotated them. Then tried to find some retro colour schemes that would fit this mid-century-modern-ish design!
The design offers lots of colouring options (from simple to more complicated). This one reminds me of cotton swabs. I can’t decide if this one’s really my favourite….
More complicated colouring just seems to detract from the simple yet striking design.
Rotating the blocks provides even more colouring options. Check out the pinwheel shapes that emerge when you turn each block 90 degrees. (The windmill shapes are still there too.)
The design works in many different combinations of three colours (or two plus white).
I can create a similar effect with just the pinwheels instead. Same blocks, small variation.
Turning the blocks again can produce a slightly chaotic design. I like this one – at first glance it seems disordered, but when you look more closely, you can see that it’s actually a regular, repetitive layout. The windmill shapes are still there; there are just fewer of them (only four complete windmills per colour), with hints of others around the outside.
I stuck with the slightly offset layout, just for something different. But many of these designs would work in a square layout with smaller, matching borders (or none at all).
Each block is made up of drunkard’s path blocks or semicircles, plus two half-rectangle triangles. A chain-piecing dream!
Sunday sketch #241
What do you think of the 2021 Pantone Color(s) of the Year? (Me? Meh.)
The Pantone Color Institute picked yellow (‘Illuminating’) and grey (‘Ultimate Gray’) for its colours this year. (It’s not the first time they’ve chosen two instead of one; in 2016 they selected baby pink and baby blue (sorry… ‘Rose Quartz’ and ‘Serenity’). Ugh.)
Anyways… I figured I’d try the yellow/grey combo in a design! I’m always on the lookout for new colour combinations. (And the first quilt I ever made was in yellow and grey prints, so I have a soft spot for this palette.)
I’ve been experimenting with block-based designs based on only two blocks – it’s an interesting visual exercise, and a good way to find unexpected secondary shapes.
I’m always fascinated by how colouring a design differently can give a quilt pattern a whole new look. But what’s great about this design is that colouring the pieces in the same way, but in a different palette, also produces a different effect. In the version above, the grey diamonds create a ripple effect of concentric (almost) circles. But in the version below, when the colours are switched, the white diamonds don’t have quite the same effect.
But this design is also a perfect example of how colouring the pieces differently can create a completely different look and feel. I added another 2 rows and columns of alternating blocks to the design below, but it’s the same checkerboard arrangement of only 2 blocks. It somehow seems a bit more complicated when colours are split between blocks, pulling some together and pushing others apart.
And we can complicate things even further…
Look at all that movement! And all of it comes from colour placement; it’s the exact same design as the version before it. I love it!
This design could be made into a quilt quite easily, as it’s just 2 square blocks repeated in an alternating arrangement. One block comprises 2 diamond shapes (or 4 triangle-in-a-square units). The other block is a cross block with a square in the middle, which could be constructed in a number of ways.
Sunday sketch #240
I don’t often design quilts with lots of long straight lines, because I know how much it would annoy me to make a quilt that needed that level of precision 🙂 I’m a bit of a perfectionist, so I try not to set myself challenges that I know will play on my worst characteristics!
But having said that, I’ve long wanted to design a quilt pattern that echoes the branching lines of a phylogenetic tree – the diagram that depicts the evolutionary relationships between living things. I saw one recently for genomic variants of the coronavirus.
So I set myself some rules (some of which I broke), and repeated sets of rectangles to create the feeling of going from large groups to small ones, and then even smaller ones.
I actually started with a vertical layout, and a different colour scheme.
But that layout didn’t give me enough room for different sized blocks, so I spread out sideways. And I kept it symmetrical, for a change!
I played around with a few colour palettes. I also decided I wanted to add even more blocks of different size, so inserted even larger blocks to the left of the design. This broke one of my rules, which was to use each block size in sets of 4. But I decided I didn’t have room for that approach after all.
After playing around with a few palettes, I hit on a design I liked. Then I decided I wanted it to be square(ish), so added another row (of large, medium, small, tiny and teeny blocks) at the top.
This design would be very easy to make into an actual quilt – it’s all rectangles, and the different sizes are all multiples of each other (e.g. 1 x 2; 2 x 4; 4 x 8; etc.). The hardest part would probably be counting up how many pieces you’d need of each colour, then keeping them organised after you cut them 🙂
