In Sunday sketch #287, I picked out a particular combination of shapes that I wanted to play with some more. Since then, I’ve spent a bit of time seeing what I could do with them. Not much, as it turns out! 🙂 Well, at least not much that I thought was worth sharing. But I did my usual iteration / modification, and ended up with a bunch of designs that I really like. Here they are!

So, it might not be so obvious at first glance how this design relates to Sunday sketch #287. Below left is the shape that I picked out from that sketch; below right is the modified shape I ended up with. I added one half-square triangle to each side, which changed the angle of the connection between them (diagonal rather than horizontal).

                  

But hang on – that’s not the shape I ended up using in this week’s design! Well, it almost is. Instead of having the two parts touching at just one point, I slid one part along a smidge so that they touch at both points, creating a closed loop. Connecting these loops in slightly inclining rows also creates a series of secondary shapes in the centre – diamonds and elongated diamonds. The loops and diamonds can then be coloured differently, depending on which element you want to emphasise.

You can also take elements away to modify the design yet again.

Or use colour to create different connections between certain shapes. Here, I’ve alternated the colour of the top and bottom of the loops to give the impression of a spiral or a zig-zag. I really like this version! It’s got a lot of energy, I think. Or maybe that’s just the acid yellow, haha!

This week’s designs are all made from half-square triangles and squares. I’m not sure there’d be much advantage in trying to assemble a quilt using blocks; I’d be tempted to just make a bunch of HSTs and squares and then lay them out in rows and columns to sew together. It’s the sort of design that might make you feel like you’re not making much progress until the very end.

 

Lots of lines this week. Horizontal, vertical and diagonal.

I’ve extended a diagonal line in the blocks through to the border, bisecting the quilt top diagonally. I kinda like this two-tone approach, splitting the quilt into light and dark.

In the version above, all the triangles are in black. The reverse colourway puts them all in pink instead; below I’ve rotated the design so that the black background remains in the bottom right half (otherwise it would’ve been in the top left when the colours were flipped).

I also tried the same layout on point, so that the line between the two halves of the design is horizontal rather than diagonal. Here are the two versions again, with black triangles (left) and pink triangles (right).

As usual, I’m not sure which I prefer!

This week’s sketches are all block-based designs (5 x 5 layout, or 4 x 4 on point); the blocks are made from half-square triangles and squares. The blocks are all the same, so could easily be chain-pieced. I like the design in just two colours, but you could try multiple colours per block – such as colouring the larger half-square triangles differently than the smaller ones.