Tagged: drunkard’s path
Sunday sketch #359
This week’s sketch(es) remind me a little of Sunday sketch #296 – they’re both tessellations of a curvy shape with a star in the middle.
Whereas Sunday sketch #296 relied mostly on half-circles, this week’s shape uses quarter-circles or drunkard’s path units. Here I’ve used palette of three colours.
But two also works….
Or more than two. (With a busier palette, I often like to use one colour for a single element of all the blocks for a bit of consistency: here I’ve used white.)
You can get a better idea of the basic building block from this next version, where I’ve used a single colour (plus background colour) per block. The ‘reverse’ tessellated shapes (the ones that are mostly background colour) are made from the corner elements of 4 adjacent blocks.
This week’s designs use a 4 × 4 block in a standard layout, and each block is made up of quarter-circle/drunkard’s path units, plus a few orange peel units. The precise number would depend on your preferred layout, of course.
This is by no means a completely original shape; I’m sure it’s out there already in quilt land. I haven’t saved anything like it on my Pinterest board of curvy quilts, but that doesn’t mean it’s not out there. If you know of a quilt pattern based on this shape, let me know and I’ll update this post!
Sunday sketch #356
OK, this week’s sketch is admittedly a bit wacky, but it’s just one variation of a block-based design that I thought was worth sharing.
The block itself is made up of one large and five small drunkard’s path units. On its own, it looks a bit like a UFO or some kind of sea creature (although it also reminds me a bit of the Shine Dome. Or maybe Thing from the Addams family!). But when one block is positioned next to another block, those drunkard’s path units combine to create interlocking crochet-hook-like shapes. Can you see them?
Rotating the blocks creates a different kind of movement, but those interlocking hooks are still there.
I simplified the design to highlight those hook shapes, although I don’t like this version as much; the balance of the small and large drunkard’s path units adds to the design, I think.
I do have a soft spot for two-colour designs where the same motif or shape appears in both colours.
This week’s design could be made using lots of drunkard’s path units – not quarter-circles, but the ones where there’s a bit of a gap between the curve and the edges of the square.
Sunday sketch #349
A quick, cute design this week, and an excuse to talk about colour placement.
This design is set on point, and just features squares and quarter-circles (or drunkard’s path units). In the version above, the squares are coloured the same as the background, and the curves are in white, yellow, orange (light, medium or dark) or pink.
Even though each row features squares of background colour, they look like they’re two zig-zagging lines twisting round each other – like a double coil of white plus another colour. I’m not sure what optical illusion is at play here; it’s not really a transparency effect, because white plus any of these colours wouldn’t produce that background colour. But somehow the brain just seems to imagine that those squares are connecting the curves on either side to create a long, winding coil.
The design works horizontally too.
And in a more limited palette.
The design doesn’t have the same effect with a different colour placement though. Below I’ve used different placement in each row, and you can see how it changes the whole effect – in some places, the transparency is there but less effective; in other cases, it’s gone completely, leaving quite a clunky design in its wake.
The first row above features a transparency effect: the white and red zig-zags overlap in pink squares, which makes sense. I feel like it’s a bit ‘heavier’ than the second row. The third and fifth rows lose that effect completely, and feel very clunky (and boring) to me. The fourth row retains the zig-saggy feel (for the most part), but using red to colour in the squares where the white and pink ‘overlap’ doesn’t quite work, so feels a bit wrong.
So anyway, if a pattern featured a design like this, I think it would be important to tell people how the overall effect might change with different fabric placement. Something that looks great on paper might end up looking very dodgy in fabric if you weren’t careful.
Of course, the same design can be coloured completely differently, to avoid any of these problems 🙂
These designs could be made into quilts by arranging squares and quarter-circles (or drunkard’s path units) on point. The last version uses half-square triangles instead of squares. All fairly straightforward!
