The block in last week’s Sunday sketch featured two half-square triangles whose long faces (or hypotenuses, for all you math fans out there) faced each other. By swivelling each HST by 90 degrees, I created a diagonal line running across the whole block, which (when rotated) introduces new lines to the whole design. Here, I’ve coloured one side and left the other side as the background colour.

Here it is in a palette closer to last week’s.

Because the design ends up looking like alternating blocks that are set on point, it lends itself to two-colour palette. I like colouring the outermost units so that the minor feature (in this case, the curvy pinwheels) are highlighted and feel like they’re floating against the background; otherwise, the design feels a bit ‘blocked in’ to me.

I like how the horizontal and vertical lines in the curvy pinwheels suggest another (subtle) grid across the whole design that balances out the diagonal grid, while the curves keep everything feeling more gentle and less harsh. (Sometimes I wonder if any of the things I write make sense, but I reckon there must be other people who feel the same in reaction to shapes.)

This design reminds me a bit of Sunday sketch #215 (another favourite of mine) – a simple combination of curves and HSTs that creates a diagonal checkerboard effect. I wish there were enough hours in the day (and money in the bank) to make all the quilts!

 

ps. I messed up when drafting this post, and ended up publishing it immediately instead of scheduling it. Doh! So some readers will have been confused on Friday 23 September when they got the automated email. Consider yourselves lucky to have witnessed only the second scheduling mistake in over 6 years of Sunday sketches 🙂

I’ve been having fun with lots of basic shapes lately, and this week’s sketch is no exception. It’s another one featuring half-circles, quarter-circles and half-square triangles.

This design feels a bit celestial to me… those inner stars combined with circles that look like they’re straight out of a moon phase calendar.

There are so many minor variations possible with this design – for example, by alternating the colours of the inner stars or the half-moons.

I also like to treat some blocks differently from others. In the next version, I’ve filled in the outer half-moons for the outside blocks. This means the half-moons are only created when two octagons come into contact with one another.

And I can fill in all the internal shapes so that only the squares created from the 4 corners of adjacent blocks are white.

Or add more whitespace – this time filling in both sides of the half-moons so they become circles, and then colouring some of the stars white too. This changes the design quite a bit.

I also used that dark blue as a background for one of the earlier designs, but didn’t change the colour of the dark blocks. Now it looks like there are blocks floating in space, connected only by stars.

This Sunday sketch would be relatively easy to make into a quilt; you’d just need quarter-circles (drunkard’s path units), half-circles (if you want to save yourself making double the number of quarter-circles) and half-square triangles. And some versions don’t even use the half-square triangles.