Tagged: nine patch
Finished quilt: Fizz
A while back, Tara Glastonbury of Stitch & Yarn invited me to contribute Moonshot to her next quilt exhibition, called ‘Ahead of the Curve’. I’m always thrilled to be invited to participate in any of Tara’s exhibitions, so of course I said yes! Then more recently, she asked if I had any other curvy quilts she could add to the mix. Hmm… not really. (The few curvy quilts I had weren’t really suitable.) I did have a few designs up my sleeve though. This was mid-October. Could I finish a quilt in time for posting to the exhibition venue by mid-November? Well, nothing gets me moving like an external deadline! 🙂 Here’s Fizz.
Continue reading
Sunday sketch #382
I talked about lines last week, and here they are again.
Last week’s design emerged from this week’s – and you might be able to spot the similarities (hint: look at those curved nine-patches). But it took me a few steps to get there….
I’ve been thinking lately about the possibilities of combining two alternating blocks in a design, rather than tiling a single block across an entire design. So I started with a nine-patch and alternated it with a block in which all four corners have a curve pointing towards the centre, making a kinda fat cross shape (which I’ve coloured in warm tones here). In the next version, the blocks are laid out on point. Can you see where one block ends and the next begins?
Separating the arms of each shape (or maybe just the hands?) with a black line presents some alternative colouring options for the squares in the nine-patches.
I felt like making those thin lines more of a feature, so added a border around the nine-patch blocks. Now do you have a better idea of where each block ends and the next one begins?
As usual, I tried a standard layout instead of an on-point one, just to see if the design becomes more interesting. Hmmm… I don’t think so?
As before, those lines create lots of opportunities for playing with colour placement.
Even if I pare it back to a two-colour palette, you can see how many variations there could be.
But I decided that the design didn’t really benefit from those straight lines. Instead, I could echo the curves in the main shapes by surrounding the nine-patches with a squircle (a square-ish circle).
For some reason I prefer the cross shapes on point, but the squircles in a standard layout. So I opted to make a feature of the squircles, and used the standard layout.
As much as I love that multicolour palette of warm tones, I think this design also lends itself to a much simpler palette. I feel like that makes it easier to see the shapes and how they play with each other.
Like last week’s sketch, this week’s could be made using squares, rectangles, drunkard’s paths (or quarter-circles) and skinny strips. I’d find it difficult to sew all those skinny strips evenly and smoothly, I think; it would take a bit of practice. I don’t usually post sketches that I’d struggle to make myself, but I’m treating this week’s sketch as aspirational – I’d love to be able to use skinny strips in this way! I know it’s possible, but it’s something I’ll have to work on.
Sunday sketch #352
This week’s design is an iteration of last week’s; I’ve basically just removed the curves and added large squares in their place. Oh, and I lightened the whole design by swapping the colouring of the light and dark elements.
One issue with this sketch is that the elements that look like blocks – basically a large coloured square with four smaller units at the corners – overlap with each other at those corners, which makes colouring in a little difficult. Apart from the very first ‘block’ at the top left (I’m putting ‘block’ in quotes because technically, the way I designed this sketch, they’re not blocks), every other block is ‘missing’ at least one of its elements in its own colour; the adjacent block(s) overlap with their own colour(s). I don’t think it’s super-obvious here, and I’ve tried to follow the rule that the ‘block’ to the left/top takes precedence in terms of colouring, but… I don’t love the fact that this is a feature of this design. It just means an extra step of thinking when it comes to colour, which I try to avoid 🙂 I also think it would be a pain to try and explain in a pattern, for example. (Which makes me realise that even though I haven’t decided whether or not to publish my own patterns, I do tend to think about these things whenever I’m designing a sketch.)
Anyway. Those internal spaces feel a little ’empty’ to me, so I tried filling them with more squares. I feel like the dark squares are too dark, but the coloured squares make the overall design feel a little too jumbly (is that a word?).
Maybe another shape would fit in there? The curves worked last week because they don’t introduce any straight lines to compete with the squares, and squares work this week because… well, they’re just more squares, and the new lines they create are parallel to the existing lines. So I’m not sure what else could work in there.
Anyway, here are a few versions where I’ve swapped the light and dark elements back to their original placement from last week. Instead of the inner squares being dark, they’re in colour, and the large bars framing each of the coloured squares are black. (Actually I used charcoal here, to lighten the whole design just a smidge.)
Again, those internal spaces feel a little empty to me. Here are two versions with the dark and colour squares instead.
This week’s sketch, like last week’s, was originally designed using two different blocks in a standard layout, not the same block on point (despite how it looks). But obviously, once I’ve removed the curves from last week’s design, this version could be made much more easily using a single block that’s set on point. In that case, you’d be using a modified nine-patch block, and all you’d need are squares and rectangles, with some triangles for the empty spaces along the edges and at the corners.
This is one of those designs where I was fairly sure it must’ve been done before – I mean, it’s just a modified nine-patch. I did a quick search on Pinterest and Google and didn’t find anything exactly the same, but that’s by no means exhaustive. I’d be surprised if there isn’t something similar out there in quilt land. If you know of a pattern like this week’s sketch, let me know and I’ll update this blog post!
