Tagged: half-circle

Sunday sketch #360

I’ve been playing with curves lately, so expect more curvy designs in the coming weeks. This week’s sketch is a trippy drippy design based on a repeating block.

I tried this design in a few different colourways, and found that the best palette comprised different shades of the same colour. I also found that it worked best with the darker colour up top, with the gradation lightening as you descend the page.

The designs I’ve shown here use a 4 × 4 layout with top and bottom borders. The blocks are made using half-circles (or 2 × drunkard’s path units), squares and rectangles. If you wanted to recreate this design, you wouldn’t necessarily have to use a single repeated block; you could mix up the lengths of the drips and make it a bit less repetitive.

 

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 #355

This week’s sketch is the last in a series of related sketches that started with Sunday sketch #353 (although the first one really started with Sunday sketch #306).

I’ve replaced the horizontally bisected circles with diagonally divided ones. The angle of division isn’t the same as the angle of the tops and bottoms of the elongated diamond shapes (which are formed from half-rectangle triangles), so the resulting grid is diagonal rather than square.

Here it is in a bright palette.

As with the previous weeks’ designs, I think the choice of colour palette is important. I’ve chosen a mix of dark, medium and light values. The design is balanced enough that the placement of colours doesn’t seem to make a huge difference.

Here are 4 of the 5 possible colour combinations of that last version of the design (the only one that’s missing is the pink background with the red and white switched):

I think they all work quite well!

I thought last week’s sketch was my favourite, but the more I look at this one, the more I love it (and I loved it quite a lot to begin with haha). I’m not entirely sure how I’d make those diagonally bisected circles – I guess by making the circle and then just insetting it on the diagonal, making sure to get the points lined up exactly at 45 and 135 degrees in the surrounding square? Then it’d just be a case of chain-piecing a bunch of them. I absolutely love the repetitiveness of designs like this one – the thought of being able to cut out everything beforehand, batch-sew a bunch of similar units, then piece together multiple units of the same type makes me very happy 🙂 I know that would bore the hell out of a lot of quilters, but it’s my happy place.

This week’s sketches are the last in this series of related designs, so there’ll be something new next week. I can’t guarantee I won’t revisit this design in future though!