Tagged: half-rectangle triangles
Sunday sketch #212
This week’s design came out of the same sketching session that produced Sunday sketch #207. You can see that they use a lot of the same shapes (half-square triangles and half-rectangle triangles). Whereas Sunday sketch #207 used a single small motif repeated over and over, this design is a 6 x 6 layout of a spiky block that’s rotated up or down, creating more spiky secondary shapes.
This design could be rotated so the bands of coloured shapes extend vertically instead, but I prefer the horizontal layout. I can see the hint of diagonal lines extending between the blocks, thanks to the angles of some of those shapes. And for some reason, they’re less clear in the vertical layout (at least to me).
With a design like this, which extends to two sides of the frame (rather than all four), adding a border (like the binding on a quilt) gives a slightly different feel.
The reverse colourway also works (without binding, this time).
I was playing with this design when Libs Elliott announced the release of her latest range of fabrics, Phosphor, which is due in stores in August. It looks like a great collection of super-saturated, vibrant colours with a faint denim pattern. I downloaded the image files from Andover Fabrics and imported them into my EQ8 fabric library. Here’s Dayglow mixed with Kona Storm. This pic doesn’t do it justice!
I love working with solids and basics, so I’m looking forward to seeing these fabrics in person.
This design uses mostly half-square triangles and half-rectangle triangles, although there’s one triangle in the block that’s non-standard. Paper-piecing would probably be the easiest way to get the angles right without complicated cutting and measuring. Of course, the design could be tweaked to replace that non-standard shape with a half-rectangle triangle, but it gives a slightly different look overall, and I preferred this one. Sometimes the easiest way is not the best way 🙂
Sunday sketch #208
This week’s sketch uses the same motif as last week’s, but with an added row of blocks and a different colour scheme.
For some reason, I prefer this design arranged vertically rather than horizontally, but of course it would work either way. And it can be coloured in a million different ways. Here are just a few examples….
These first two versions highlight the vertical lines between blocks.
That can be taken a step further by iterating through a few different colour pairings for each column of blocks. This one’s one of my favourites. I feel like the big vertical zig-zags are much more obvious in the second and fourth columns than in the others. Can you see what I mean?
Or we can use colour to ignore the delineation between the columns:
In hindsight, I think all of these designs would’ve worked better if I’d extended the blocks to the top and bottom of the quilt top, rather than having a white border all the way around. An easy fix, but not one I could be bothered going back to correct right now 🙂
And, finally, a horizontal layout just to show you what it looks like.
That design cycles through three colours from top to bottom – green, black, white – and I used six rows of shapes to ensure that the top and bottom of the quilt top both ended up being green. It’s a fairly busy, energetic design as a result! Not necessarily one of my favourites, but I still liked it enough to post.
Like last week’s design, this one’s all flying geese units and half-rectangle triangles (or triangle-in-a-square units).
Sunday sketch #207
How about a slightly spicy design to follow last week’s palate cleanser?
This started out as a hand-drawn sketch on my Rhodia dot pad, as a mix between flying-geese triangles and half-rectangle triangles (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: triangles are so versatile!). I wanted the lines from each flying geese block to lead into the adjacent flying geese blocks, creating a large zig-zag. And at the same time, the straight lines from the half-rectangle triangles would connect to the facing block.
I recreated the design in EQ8 so that I could play with colour. There are quite a few ways to combine just three colours in this design, each of which give it a slightly different feel.
And, of course, my usual favourite combo of red, pink and white.
I feel like the light pink against the red gives a bit of a transparency feel, and helps to make those large zig-zags – which carve a path down the page – a little clearer.
The design doesn’t necessarily have to flow vertically down the page; it would work just as well horizontally.
These designs could be made into quilts using just two blocks: a flying geese block and a triangle in a square block (or two half-rectangle triangles instead). Pretty straightforward, but with striking results.
