There are only so many shapes to choose from in quilting. One of the design elements that I keep coming back to is the half-rectangle triangle and – more specifically – lines with a 1:2 gradient (that is, they go up or down 1 unit with every move sideways of 2 units… as if you laid a 2:1 HRT on its side). I’ve stacked up lines like this in previous sketches (look at Sunday sketches #102 and #103, for example), and I’m revisiting them again this week.

I started with a ‘comb’, which is basically just a series of those diagonal lines, joined up vertically on either side. Then I overlapped another one, and another one, which created these funny little cat faces in the middle.

I decided that maybe I should see what the same design looked like with the ‘combs’ facing different directions. So I redrew the whole thing, alternating the angles. Instead of up-down-up, now they’re down-up-down.

Not a huge difference, although the first column of cats is now upside-down. But somehow I do prefer the second sketch. It has a slightly different feel to me, although I can’t quite put my finger on why.

Anyway, then I decided that I wanted to see more of these combs overlapping, but instead of arranging them vertically, I thought I’d try them horizontally. Time to pull out the A4 Rhoda dot pad for some larger sketching!

Again, this has quite a different feel than the previous two sketches, despite being based on the same core design. The scale is a bit smaller (assuming the overall quilt dimensions were about the same) and there’s a bit more movement. I like them all, but for different reasons.

I love the look of the clean black lines in this sketch, but colour would add another dimension. And there’s obviously some real potential here for transparency in colour play.

A few months ago, I posted a series of Sunday sketches that I designed using Electric Quilt 8 (#88, 89, 91–93). But after that, I made a concerted effort to stop designing in EQ8 for awhile and return to pen and paper. It was actually quite difficult to tear myself away from the computer and get back into a slower – but ultimately more satisfying – way of working.

I’ve struggled to use EQ8, for a few reasons. It doesn’t feel intuitive to me, so I feel like I’m wasting a lot of time searching for functionality that should be more readily accessible. I’ve also found that it’s a time suck; maybe because it’s screen-based, it’s easy to spend a lot of time playing around with it, often without many great results. Sometimes it can feel like it’s a faster way to create, but I’m never as happy with the outcomes. And even if it takes me half as long to get half as many good sketches as pen-and-paper drawing… well, it hasn’t saved me much time at all.

Having said all that, EQ8 is great for two things in particular: colour and repetition. I can tile a block in no time, and then colour it in a million different ways. This week’s sketch is the perfect example.

A 5 × 5 grid of square blocks ends up looking like 5 continuous rows of half-rectangle triangles. Carrying colours beyond the blocks also helps to disguise their edges, so you’re not quite sure where one block ends and the next one begins.

Don’t you just love this colour palette? Black, grey, white, khaki, and a dusky pink. I like how the gentleness of those colours balances out the sharpness of the triangles. I think this design would look great in some really bold colours too though. Or even some prints.

This design could be made into a quilt pattern using 3:1 half-rectangle triangles. Paper-piecing would be a really good way of achieving the precision needed to match all those points.