I’ve often said that I’ll revert to playing with half-square triangles if I don’t have any new ideas up my sleeve. And often, it’s easy to come up with something using HSTs. This week’s design isn’t novel – you might even argue that it’s not modern – but I like it for its calmness and repetition, its simplicity, and this muted colour scheme. It feels like a much-needed palette cleanser.

These blocks are square and set on point. The blocks themselves have a 4 x 4 layout: HST ‘borders’ surrounding a central square, that itself can be a large HST. The next designs play around with colouring the internal (large) HST and the external (small) HSTs in different ways.

Or I can colour them all in for a bolder look. This feels modern yet traditional; old yet new. I love designs like this.

Using a reverse colourway for just the blocks (rather than for the design as a whole) helps to show you how they’re square blocks set on point:

Expanding the colour palette gives you additional options, too.

This week’s designs could all be made into an actual quilt using HSTs and squares (or more HSTs). I tend to put broad borders around designs like this one, to give the eye more negative space to rest on. But I know plenty of people hate adding borders to quilts. I think the designs would work well without them too.