I use curves so much more in my designs now than I used to… probably because I feel more comfortable sewing curves now than I did when I started out quilting. This week’s Sunday sketch uses two blocks in an alternating arrangement: one block is all curves, while the other one is all angles (creating a star shape).

In the first iteration of this design, the stars are coloured differently depending on whether they’re in a ‘flower’ (a shape created by 4 half-circles) or between them.

Colouring all the stars the same way brings those shapes more to the foreground….

And reversing the colourway of the stars – by making the arms dark blue, and the centres white – pushes them to the background, and makes the flower shapes more prominent.

Reducing the colour palette, and flipping the colour from the flowers to the stars, changes the design once again. Look at the movement now! Suddenly secondary curves emerge from all those connected star shapes. I love this version.

But wait, there’s more… 🙂

Adding another colour brings more movement. Now it’s like two pieces of lace, one pink and one yellow, overlapping.

How about we remove the white flowers altogether, and just stick with the stars.

Hmm, perhaps that’s a bit busy (although I still love it). Through those last few designs, another shape has emerged: the stars surrounded by a halo of concave curves. Here they are again, in an alternating colourway. Don’t you just love those big curvy curves that emerge from the dark background?

Anyway, let’s add the missing blocks back in (once again in white).

We can minimise the amount of white by colouring only the centre stars of the flowers.

To help connect the two groups of shapes, let’s make the centres of all the stars the same colour: white. This also helps to bring those larger curves – which almost disappeared in the last few iterations – back into view.

From the first iteration to the last (for now) – all the same design, but quite a different look and feel for each one. I’ll share more versions next week. I have loads!

This design is relatively simple: two blocks, arranged in an 11 x 11 checkerboard pattern. One block consists of two semi-circles, facing each other. The other block is a star shape made of 4 kite-in-a-square blocks, with the kite heads made up of a half-square triangle – 4 of which form the centre square of the star. (Does that block have another name…? Probably, but I don’t know what it is.) The only difference between all these designs is which elements are coloured, and how. Which is your favourite?