Tagged: half-square triangles
Sunday sketch #314
This is one of my favourite Sunday sketches in a long time. It combines two of my favourite things: a simple yet effective design, and an understated palette that I’ve used before. It feels a little retro, a little modern. I love it.
Colouring the blocks slightly differently introduces horizontal lines and makes it clearer where blocks begin and end.
And then rotating the blocks introduces new shapes and movement.
That last one’s maybe a bit too trippy, but I love the first two designs! Although I can’t decide which I prefer… I like the simplicity of the first one, until I see the second one and realise I like the added horizontal lines… but maybe less is more?! Arrghh. (This indecision is probably the main reason I don’t make more quilts!)
These designs could be made into quilts using quarter- or half-circles (or drunkard’s path units), half-square triangles and rectangles. I love the limited palette of just three colours, but perhaps the design is simple enough that it could work with a broader palette?
Sunday sketch #313
We’re having a chilly winter in Melbourne this year, so I’m already dreaming of spring! This week’s sketch is also a good excuse to use my happy palette of warm yellows, pinks and oranges.
These cute flower blocks are offset by a half-block in each row, which elongates each flower ‘stem’ by extending it into the space between the two blocks beneath.
In the first version, I’ve used the same colouring for all the upper and lower ‘leaves’ in the blocks, with different colours for the flowers. But of course, the leaves can have a mix of colours too.
That’s a bit busy for my liking; here’s a version with all the blocks coloured in the same way. I’m not sure if it’s the limited palette or the darker greens that really help to highlight the repetition in those skinny curves and vertical lines.
Then I tweaked the design of the flowers themselves – this next design’s a bit more like a tulip, I think. This variation also creates a lovely diagonal movement from top left to bottom right, thanks to those new teardrop-shaped red ‘petals’.
This week’s sketch would be tricky, but not impossible, to translate into an actual quilt. It would take a combination of half-square triangles, drunkard’s path blocks, and skinny curved inset strips.
Sunday sketch #310
I ended last week’s post by promising to show some iterations of Sunday sketch #309 that are more traditional. But first, here’s a more modern-ish version.
To get more modern-ish versions, I find it easier to start with a full design and then take things away, rather than starting with a blank design and adding things randomly. Why is that…?
Anyway, on to some iterations that feel decidedly more ‘traditional’ to me.
This is essentially the same design as last week, but with the individual shapes coloured differently to emphasise each one. Actually, these variations still aren’t showing every single shape; for example, the vertical and horizontal diamonds in the next version are actually made up of four pieces (the side pieces of four triangle-in-a-square units). I’ve just coloured them in a single shade, otherwise my brain would go crazy from the bitty-ness of it all.
And of course, so many pieces means soooo many colour combinations, permutations and variations. This next one feels very Parc Güell to me – a bit mosiac-y.
If so many pieces are too many pieces for you, it’s possible to pare this design back to even fewer pieces than I used last week. This creates a layout of 8-pointed stars, separated at their corners by large squares.
And I can pare it back even further, allowing some of those inner octagons to stand on their own. I like how their edges still align with those of their neighbouring stars. This might be one of my favourite versions!
Finally, like last week, I can shift alternating rows of blocks across by one half-block, and the tips of the stars will still touch. This creates some new secondary shapes and some new movement in the design – instead of vertical columns of blocks, I now have angled stacks. This lends itself to new design variations too.
I stuck with the sawtooth star as the centre unit of these blocks because I wanted the link to last week’s designs to be clear. But you could replace it with any square-based unit… a nine-patch, a different kind of star, a circle even.
I love how a single block can look so different depending on how its components are coloured. I’ve always thought if I ever sold patterns, I could market the same one to two completely different target markets, just by changing up the fabric and colour placement!
