Sunday sketch #249

Here’s another design that ended up looking quite different from where it started.

This design started out much more ‘flat’, with very little depth. Although I still like the original versions! The shapes remind me of Nutri-Grain cereal 🙂

The design is kinda woven, with the white shapes connected by perpendicular rows of three white squares, and the coloured shapes connected by perpendicular rows of three coloured squares. If I colour just the middle connecting squares, it might be easier to see what I mean.

See how they’re connected along the diagonals?

From there, I moved to colouring each element a little differently. This adds a lot more movement and depth to the design. It’s still diagonal strings of shapes connected to one another, but now the shapes are a little more complicated. The following two variations show a zoomed-in, cropped part of the design, without the border, but it’s still the same underlying design.

And in another colourway…

I even took it a step further, colouring in some of the squares, leaving just the middle one in the row of three. This ends up creating those larger squares, which alternate with the smaller ones.

In all these variations, there are some nice four-pointed stars peeking out of the middle – can you see them? The stars in each row of these secondary shapes alternate direction.

This design is just squares and half-square triangles – that’s it! So it would be very easy to make into a quilt.

 

Sunday sketch #248

A very basic design this week, which immediately brings to mind arches and tunnels.*

Whenever I sit down to sketch without any particular design in my head, I start by playing around with basic shapes – circles, squares, triangles, rectangles. This is the first thing I came up with this week – a few lines, a few curves. A cute colour palette that makes me happy.

It’s not a groundbreaking design – someone somewhere will have already made a quilt just like this, I’m sure. (I even searched Pinterest for examples, but no luck. Laura Ward’s ‘Getting over the hump’ quilt uses arches of different scale and a limited colour palette, and Tula Pink’s Gothic Arches quilt pattern repeats the same shapes at different scales… but I can’t find an example of curved arches repeated like this… if you know of one, tell me and I’ll update this post!)

Anyway… my goal with the Sunday sketches is to explore geometry, practice playing with new shapes, make designs that make me happy… and inspire others to do the same. Sometimes even the most basic designs tick those boxes.

The blocks can be rotated to create a secondary shape – those black lozenges cut across with coloured triangles. The horizontal breaks between the rows feel like they’re descending slowly to the right… is that just an optical illusion?

I also tried a version in which the blocks don’t have that horizontal strip of colour at the bottom. This allows the arches and tunnels to sit directly on top of each other. In some cases, the background colour of one arch flows into the foreground colour of the tunnel above it. I don’t really plan colour placement when I’m colouring designs like this… I just work with one colour at a time and try to space things out so they feel comfortable to me. Occasionally I’ll avoid placing the same colours next to one another, but other times I just let it happen.

One advantage to removing the horizontal strip is that when blocks are rotated, the lines flow from one to the other without interruption.

And, because all these tunnels and arches make me think of aqueducts, I made a design with blocks of different size – a bit like the Pont du Gard.

These blocks are all made with triangles (somewhere between half-square triangles and half-rectangle triangles), curves (two adjacent drunkard’s path units or a single semi-circle) and strips. It would require lots of repetitive piecing, but I find that those quilts are often the fastest to sew!

* My husband helpfully suggested that I paint this design on a wall and wait for someone to crash into it hahahaha. Yes, it’s a bit Wile E. Coyote / Road Runner-esque…!

Sunday sketch #247

Time for some new shapes this week.

Have you tried freezer paper piecing? It’s like foundation paper piecing, but instead of sewing on to paper templates, you press the fabric on to freezer paper templates to hold it in place, and you sew the seams without sewing through the paper. This means there’s no need to rip paper out at the end, and you can use the templates again and again. I first learned this technique from another member of the Melbourne Modern Quilt Guild (hi MJ!) and then again from Tara Faughnan in a workshop (Tara has a few online classes teaching this technique, and a CreativeBug class too.)

Anyway, so I’m not a huge fan of foundation paper piecing, but I do occasionally use freezer paper piecing, and the more I do, the more I’m hooked. So I’ve been thinking more lately about freezer paper-piece-able designs. I love a New York beauty block (all those spikes!) so tried a double-layer spiky design.

You can start to see how I designed the block by looking at all the colouring variations….

It looks just as good in the reverse colourway, too.

Each block is made from four quarter-blocks, which can be rearranged in other ways, too.

And the design works in multiple colours, too. These primary colours really pack a punch!

This design would be most easily made using templates for foundation paper piecing or freezer paper piecing, plus some curved strips for in-between the spiky bits.