Tagged: half-square triangles
Sunday sketch #150
Can you believe it?! I’ve managed to post a new Sunday sketch every week for 150 weeks in a row! I should’ve probably organised something special for this week, but I’m just posting my latest sketch.
This design repeats the same shape – made mostly by half-square triangles – four times in a single block, then repeats the block in a 4×4 formation.
I love that happy colour palette!
Adding a twisted square in the centre of the block helps to create new shapes – four little hearts, pointing in four different directions – and provides new options for colouring. This version of the design kinda reminded me of petals around the centre of a flower, so I coloured it in my go-to palette of white and warm yellow.
And, of course, now I can’t decide which one I like more.
This pattern could be made using half-square triangles and rectangles. In the second version, the centre might need to be paper-pieced for precision. In both cases, you’d need to sew a partial seam (just one) to piece the four shapes around the central square.
Sunday sketch #149
I bought a double drunkard’s template from Jenny Haynes (Papper, Sax, Sten) awhile back, and I really loved using it to create ‘Blue Wave‘. I keep thinking that I need to design more quilts with that curved motif. And of course, I’m always trying to find new ways to use half-square triangles.
I designed a 2 x 2 block in EQ8: two curves diagonally across from each other, and the other two squares comprising a rectangle and two half-square triangles. There are a million ways you can arrange and colour these blocks, but I settled on a 4 x 4 layout in which the blocks are rotated and feature only 3 colours.
But I also like the look of fewer blocks, all facing the same way.
I’m tempted to tweak this design slightly to remove the bottom-right corner (in hot pink), so that a quilt made from this design would have two square corners and two rounded corners. That’s not something I’ve seen very often (or at all?), but I think it would look pretty cool.
These designs could be made using Jenny Haynes’ double drunkard’s templates (or your own version), rectangles and half-square triangles.
Sunday sketch #145
A few weeks ago, I mentioned how much I like playing around with basic shapes like squares and triangles. Here’s another design along the same lines (pun intended!).
This one emerged from Sunday sketch #143. Sometimes when I’m redrawing a design – so that I can make minor design tweaks or recolour it – I’ll pick out certain shapes (like those central white and green squares) and draw them first, then connect them by drawing all the intervening lines. It’s a methodical and intentional approach that tends to lead to fewer mistakes.
But often, once I’ve drawn the beginning shapes, I veer off in another direction and create a new design. So even though this week’s design is related to #143… the similarities may not be so obvious.
Like many of my recent designs, this one would probably be easiest to convert to a quilt pattern by treating it as a collection of smaller units (half-square triangles and half-rectangle triangles) rather than whole blocks. It’s on point, but not offset by 45 degrees; but you could make it and trim it down to a square easily enough.
