Tagged: half-square triangles
Sunday sketch #181
Another hand-drawn sketch this week, and a super-simple one at that.
You can see from the scale of the background dots and my fill lines just how small this design was on the page of my Rhodia dot pad – only a few centimetres across! I love a good triangle, and I just started placing them on the page, following only one rule: each triangle I added had to touch an adjacent triangle, but only at a tip (no back-to-back edges allowed). I stopped when I was happy with the random arrangement.
Those of you who know how much I like symmetry and order can probably see that despite the ‘improv’ nature of this design, it’s still fairly well balanced in terms of positive vs negative space, and the number of shapes in each quadrant. Even when I’m not trying to be ‘ordered’, it happens 🙂
I like the idea of super-sizing this design to make a bed-sized quilt. Which would mean fairly large triangles, but that would also mean a fairly quick make – and what’s not to like about that?
Sunday sketch #174
I’m still stuck on the same theme as Sunday sketches #173 and #172… folded strips creating interesting shapes.
I love how this design brings two fairly hefty groupings of strips together at a single point, right in the centre of the design.
The vertical black strips meet in the middle, as do the diagonal orange strips. And then they shoot off in the opposite direction, leaving a bold diagonal line in their wake.
I tried recreating this design in EQ8, but I don’t love how it turned out.
(It might’ve helped if I’d put a border around the whole quilt so you could clearly see where the edges are.)
Somehow the difference between the line weights was more obvious in EQ8… the vertical lines are skinnier than the diagonal ones (because geometry!), but I could live with that in the hand-drawn sketch. In the EQ8 version, the design just ended up looking too sparse. Maybe it was my colour choice? I dunno. I ended up adding 2 more lines, but that didn’t really help.
I would’ve liked to extend the diagonal red lines all the way to the corner of the top and bottom edges, but that would’ve made the quilt very wide, which I felt was unbalanced and left too much negative space. So I kept playing, and came up with a square version…
…which I like, but for different reasons. I think the fact that the pink lines are now fully overlapped (or ‘underlapped’?) with red lines fundamentally changes the design. I liked it when they had a bit of space on their own. Still, I like the boldness of this design and the fact that all four corners are (almost) occupied by a strip. Half of the quilt is still negative space, although I don’t think that necessarily matters.
I played around a bit more with the colours in EQ8, which is so easy to do.
And how about this one, for a very 80s vibe…
But after all that, I think I still prefer the original hand-drawn sketch!
These designs could be translated fairly easily into quilt patterns using the same approaches as suggested for the previous weeks’ designs: long strips, lots of half-square triangles, and/or paper piecing for accuracy.
Sunday sketch #173
Another variation on the same theme as last week’s sketch: folded strips.
I kinda wish the strips in the foreground were wider than those in the background, but I couldn’t quite get that to work out. Of course, I could just push those white vertical strips to the background, so that the thicker diagonal lines came to the foreground! Problem solved.
I tried recreating this design in EQ8 and didn’t like the way it turned out. I’m not sure if it was my colour choices or the design itself. It’s funny how some sketches just look better hand-drawn.
This design could be made into a quilt pattern using lots of half-square triangles and rectangles, or a bunch of long strips (and maybe some paper-piecing for accuracy).
I’m still stuck on this theme, so expect more of these designs in the weeks to come!
