Tagged: paper piecing
Sunday sketch #222
This week’s Sunday sketch is a bit of a cheat… but since I set the rules, I figure I can break them now and then 🙂
Occasionally I’ll look back over old sketches and see if I can improve them. My designing and sewing skills have developed a fair bit in the past few years, so sometimes I see new ways of doing things. That might be by colouring designs differently, finding a different method of assembly (in my mind), or repurposing a block somehow.
This design is a reworking of Sunday sketch #41, from way back in April 2017 (!). I recreated the design in Electric Quilt 8 (I did the original with pen and paper), coloured it, and arranged the blocks on point.
(Part of me wants to rework all my sketches in this green!)
I also played around with a different layout.
I thought I’d come up with an easier way of assembling the blocks too, but then realised that it would still require a Y-seam. Or maybe paper piecing would be the best method (which is what I said in April 2017!).
Sunday sketch #221
When I first set out to design some wedge-based quilts, this week’s Sunday sketch is what I had in my head. Well, almost*. Wedges that tracked up and down, then across and up and down, and so on, and so forth, down the page. Like a continuous line, creating secondary shapes identical to the primary shapes, which themselves tracked up and down, then across and up and down… you see where I’m going with this.
This design retains the wedge outline from the previous few Sunday sketches. And the wedge shape itself is about the same (maybe slightly shorter and fatter).
* To be honest, this is not quite what I had envisaged, but it took me so long to try and get what was in my brain onto the screen, and it became so frustrating, that I eventually moved on to other designs, and then lost interest in the original. Such is life!
Anyway, like the other wedge-y Sunday sketches, changing the colours of this design gives a slightly different feel. Like changing those borders from black to white….
The white wedges become fatter, and the pink and red ones stay skinny.
Or we can flip the outline to red, and change the outer wedges to red too. I like showing the outlines on their own sometimes.
I also like this design rotated 90 degrees. When it’s upright, all I can see is the letter ‘H’! In a horizontal orientation, it’s easier to just see the wedges as shapes, undulating across the page.
I’m a big fan of this kind of nested design, where the primary shape produces identical secondary shapes. It’s very Escher-esque. If you look at my Instagram, you’ll see a few more along this theme.
Making this design into an actual quilt would be a bit tricky, I think. The design is block-based (you can easily see the repetition), but it’d take templates and paper-piecing for accuracy.
Sunday sketch #204
I continued on last week’s theme of blocks made up of thin lines. I stuck with the curvy block and added a few more, then jumbled them up. I wanted to design the blocks so that there’d be instances of (some of) the lines continuing from one block to the next. And I separated the blocks using sashing of the same thickness.
I played around with colours for ages, but didn’t find anything that I liked as much as the black and white.
The whole design feels quite whimsical to me, hence the candy colours, I think.
Or each block could be coloured differently. This gives the whole design quite a different feel (maybe also because my choice of colour palette’s not so hot).
Or monochrome. I picked a vibrant yellow, and then reversed it, but of course this would work for any combination of two colours.
This design reminds me a bit of breeze blocks, those concrete blocks that let air through. (Speaking of which, check out how quilter Ben Millett created 4″ breeze-block-like units earlier this year, here and here. I’m hoping he makes them into a quilt!)
My design could be made into a quilt pattern – with blocks in whatever arrangement you wanted – using a combination of normal piecing (for straight bits) and paper piecing (for curves) for accuracy. Lots of variation and versatility!
