Tagged: half-square triangles
Sunday sketch #256
It’s autumn in Australia. Leaves changing colour, blowing everywhere, scrunching underfoot.
It felt like a good time for some triangles!
There’s a few ways this design could be translated into a quilt. I think it would work best with foundation paper piecing using freezer paper templates. You could make the templates as long as you like, and just keep adding to them. Otherwise, you could turn the whole design on point and make it using half-square triangles, but that would introduce a lot of extra seams. You could do flying geese instead, but you’d still have some extra seams (just half as many). Or you could use templates for the triangles, and just piece them in diagonal rows, then match the rows up carefully so all the triangles are aligned.
Like I said, I think it would work best with freezer paper piecing 🙂
Sunday sketch #250
Congrats to me for making it to 250! And thank you to you for following along 🙂
Alternating blocks this week: a drunkard’s path and a bunch of half-square triangles.
Rotating the drunkard’s path blocks by 180 degrees gives the impression of moving the circles one block vertically and horizontally. This also gives the impression of a reverse colourway, although the designs are both black circles on white backgrounds. But the previous version had a dark border, whereas this one has a light border.
Alternating the direction of the drunkard’s path blocks introduces new curvy shapes, while leaving the HSTs in the same position.
And, of course, the addition of another colour can help to create new shapes and movement too.
I also tried replacing the HST block with another square block design, just to see how it would look. The ‘waves’ created by the linked drunkard’s path blocks are still there, but now there are diagonal strings of stars instead of those HST blocks. This is giving me big Star Spangled Banner vibes!
These designs are all made with an alternating arrangement of square blocks: either a drunkard’s path block or a block of 9 HSTs (or a small sawtooth star block). The HSTs block can look somewhat traditional rather than modern, but the right combination of colour and contrast will bring it into the 21st century.
Sunday sketch #249
Here’s another design that ended up looking quite different from where it started.
This design started out much more ‘flat’, with very little depth. Although I still like the original versions! The shapes remind me of Nutri-Grain cereal 🙂
The design is kinda woven, with the white shapes connected by perpendicular rows of three white squares, and the coloured shapes connected by perpendicular rows of three coloured squares. If I colour just the middle connecting squares, it might be easier to see what I mean.
See how they’re connected along the diagonals?
From there, I moved to colouring each element a little differently. This adds a lot more movement and depth to the design. It’s still diagonal strings of shapes connected to one another, but now the shapes are a little more complicated. The following two variations show a zoomed-in, cropped part of the design, without the border, but it’s still the same underlying design.
And in another colourway…
I even took it a step further, colouring in some of the squares, leaving just the middle one in the row of three. This ends up creating those larger squares, which alternate with the smaller ones.
In all these variations, there are some nice four-pointed stars peeking out of the middle – can you see them? The stars in each row of these secondary shapes alternate direction.
This design is just squares and half-square triangles – that’s it! So it would be very easy to make into a quilt.
