Tagged: half-square triangles
Sunday sketch #73
I’m really stuck on triangles at the moment. When sketching for this week’s post, triangles soon morphed into diagonal lines…which created stripes… which presented the opportunity to mix direction and shading to produce some interesting movement.
There’s some real potential for striking colour play here too, but of course it’ll take me a while to explore that 🙂
This sketch is a little like Sunday sketch #34, which I designed using Excel. They both feature diagonal, crossed stripes, but #34 had blunt ends whereas these are angled. I’ve also mixed these blocks up rather than arranging them in a sawtooth star configuration.
This design could be made into a quilt pattern using half-square and quarter-square triangles, but I’ll probably use a foundation paper-piecing template instead. I’m not convinced that I’d achieve the required precision using normal piecing. I’ve also struggled to sew strips perfectly straight with regular piecing; I always seem to end up with a slight curve.
Sunday sketch #71
Back to Excel this week for a few flying geese.
Whenever I create a design that feels familiar, I have a look through my own Pinterest feeds to see if someone else has done something similar (in which case, I wouldn’t post mine). I couldn’t see any quilt patterns with this design, but that’s not to say none exists – just that I haven’t seen it yet.*
There’s lots of scope for colour play with this design – highlighting the flying geese or the diamond-like HST pairs between them.
The easiest way to make this sketch into a quilt would be to use flying geese in pairs to make squares, then stack the squares around a solid central square to make each block.
*Update [6 November 2017]: On a Monday-night Instagram scrolling session, I found a very similar block on @harriandbear‘s feed that Vanessa had made as part of the Project 48 Quilt in 2016. The block was designed by Keera Job, and you can see her version on her Instagram feed. It’s identical in appearance to the block that makes up this quilt design; the only difference is that Keera’s flying geese units are 1.5″ x 3″ (Project 48 quilt blocks measure 9″ finished), whereas I’d envisioned the flying geese as 3″ x 6″, which would make each block 18″ square. I don’t recall seeing Keera’s design before (even though I’m involved in Project 48 this year), but perhaps it lodged in my brain ages ago and just resurfaced recently. Or perhaps different people can inadvertently come up with similar quilt designs, particularly when using the same traditional quilting shapes.
Sunday sketch #70
Whenever I discover a new design idea, I tend to disappear down the rabbit hole of re-invention, playing with the theme over and over again until I feel like I’ve exhausted it. You can see that I’m not done yet with the current theme….
Like the past few Sunday sketches (#67, #68 and #69), I’ve combined two different groups of a single shape: the black shapes stick to a regimented grid, while the red shapes float around in random locations (as long as they don’t touch each other). The difference this week is that the shapes are smaller and spaced further apart, giving a calmer, slightly less frenetic outcome.
Then again, I tried the same design with squares, and it ended up feeling a little busier:
These designs could be translated into quilt patterns quite easily – using mostly half-square triangles for the first sketch, and all squares for the second.
