Tagged: flying geese

Sunday sketch #318

I love creating block-based designs where lines from adjacent blocks combine to create new shapes. I guess that’s how secondary shapes emerge, but sometimes alternating block colouring can create secondary patterns too.

In the first version of this week’s sketch, alternating the colour placement in adjacent blocks creates a diagonal plaid effect. The colouring means that the features connected horizontally are that dark peachy-pink, while the same connected features running vertically are in light pink.

Changing the colour placement a bit eliminates the plaid effect. In the next version, both the block colouring and placement are the same (blocks are identical but every second one is rotated 90 degrees). Now light pink corners are touching dark pink sides, and vice versa.

There are enough different elements in this design that you can pick out single shapes to highlight.

Or several shapes.

Or avoid focusing on any particular shapes, and just colour all the blocks in the same two tones. That simple colouring helps to highlight those diagonal lines, too.

These designs could be made into quilts quite easily using flying geese units, squares, and triangle-in-a-square blocks.

Sunday sketch #316

I like playing with tessellations, and this week’s design is the first one I’ve posted in awhile. (Sunday sketches #296 and #297 were the last ones, I think?)

This design is based on a single block, repeated and alternately rotated.

   

If I colour the blocks slightly differently, you can see where the edges are.

The blocks can also be laid out on point, although I think I prefer the standard layout.

Rotating the blocks in a different way breaks up the tessellation but creates new and interesting secondary shapes.

Or they can all be arranged in the same way, but just coloured in an alternating grid to emphasise the shapes within each one.

As usual, I started with a minimal palette, but the design lends itself to a broader range of colours/fabrics.

This design could be made into a quilt using some pretty basic shapes: half-square triangles, half-rectangle triangles, and flying geese (if you want to save a few seams).

Sunday sketch #308

I was so excited when I created this week’s sketch, I set it aside thinking I might actually make it into a quilt… I even bought fabric! But I’ve since been distracted by many other designs and ideas… and even used some of the fabric for something else. That happens more often than I’d like to admit…!

You can probably see how this sketch evolved from last week’s. I wasn’t going to post that one last week – I much prefer this design, and I didn’t think it was really necessary to show the precursor – but I ended up sharing it so I could talk about how easily different people can come up with similar designs.

But back to this week’s design. This version chops the ends off those chevron-y bits, and instead turns them inward, creating what look like squares that are on point and overlapping. The flying geese units topping each square are still there, and there’s still the opportunity to play with foreground and background colours (and negative space). Instead of there being a vertical straight line between blocks, there are now columns of smaller squares.

A more restricted palette helps to play on the repetition in the design and introduce some more movement, I think. Those internal background squares help to join diagonally adjacent shapes of the same colour, so your eye zig-zags back and forth across the design.

Those smaller flying geese can go uncoloured (or take the background colour), which changes the main shape into something with a cut-out rather than an extension.

It’s pretty much just another excuse for my usual palette of rose pink and bright orange.

There are a few different ways that this design could be made into a quilt. I’d probably make columns of flying geese and alternate them with columns of quarter-square triangle units or square-in-a-square units. My default is always to imagine designs in solid fabrics, but I think this could work with the right prints.