Tagged: flying geese
Sunday sketch #95
Back to hand-drawn sketches! This the first week in a looooong time when I’ve posted an actual pen-and-paper sketch rather than something I created on the computer. After a fairly long hiatus, I finally forced myself back to the sketch pad this week.
I started with a fairly rough sketch I’d made of a star block awhile ago. I decided I was happy with it as-is, but repeated it to see what came up. Don’t these look like poinsettias?
From this sketch, I continued to iterate the design, and I’ll post some of the resulting sketches over the next week or so. That process of accidental discovery is something that’s been missing from my software-enabled sketching, which I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Each method definitely has its advantages, but (in my experience, at least) hand-drawn sketching leads to far more creative output.
Still, EQ8 can be useful for colouring in blocks (although still kinda clunky in certain ways):
This design could be made using a combination of squares, rectangles, flying geese or half-square triangles, kite in a square, and triangle in a square.
Sunday sketch #84
I’ve been playing around with more block-based designs lately – which you’ll see over the next few weeks.
This week’s quilt design is a supersized block based on half-square triangles (with the occasional flying geese). Simple, but striking.
This design could be made into a pattern using all half-square triangles (or HSTs and flying geese, if you can cope with one partial seam per block). You could use the centre squares to highlight fussy-cut fabrics or another smaller block, but I quite like the idea of leaving them ‘blank’ to showcase the design itself (and/or your quilting).
Sunday sketch #71
Back to Excel this week for a few flying geese.
Whenever I create a design that feels familiar, I have a look through my own Pinterest feeds to see if someone else has done something similar (in which case, I wouldn’t post mine). I couldn’t see any quilt patterns with this design, but that’s not to say none exists – just that I haven’t seen it yet.*
There’s lots of scope for colour play with this design – highlighting the flying geese or the diamond-like HST pairs between them.
The easiest way to make this sketch into a quilt would be to use flying geese in pairs to make squares, then stack the squares around a solid central square to make each block.
*Update [6 November 2017]: On a Monday-night Instagram scrolling session, I found a very similar block on @harriandbear‘s feed that Vanessa had made as part of the Project 48 Quilt in 2016. The block was designed by Keera Job, and you can see her version on her Instagram feed. It’s identical in appearance to the block that makes up this quilt design; the only difference is that Keera’s flying geese units are 1.5″ x 3″ (Project 48 quilt blocks measure 9″ finished), whereas I’d envisioned the flying geese as 3″ x 6″, which would make each block 18″ square. I don’t recall seeing Keera’s design before (even though I’m involved in Project 48 this year), but perhaps it lodged in my brain ages ago and just resurfaced recently. Or perhaps different people can inadvertently come up with similar quilt designs, particularly when using the same traditional quilting shapes.
