Tagged: quarter-rectangle triangles
Sunday sketch #350
I didn’t set out to do another basic design using a warm palette this week… but when a design uses multiple colours, I tend to gravitate to the pinks and oranges in Electric Quilt 8. I use the Kona solid colours as my default fabric library, and I guess those colours have the best mix of shades. It’s either that, or cooler blues and greens, and I was feeling warmer this week.
Anyway… I’ve spent a bit of time with quarter-rectangle triangles lately, for a few reasons. One: the release of Latifah Saafir’s HuRTy ruler, which she and I used to create the Paperdrop quilt pattern, is giving me more ideas of how to use half-rectangle triangles and quarter-rectangle triangles. And two: I’ve spent the last week or two seeing pics of Avalanche, one of the four quilts I had hanging at QuiltCon in Atlanta and which is entirely made from quarter-rectangle triangles.
In this week’s design, I’ve just set the blocks on point and coloured some of the triangles in the background colour to introduce some negative space. Otherwise it all feels a bit crowded.
Here’s a multicoloured version. There’s obviously opportunity for transparency here, but I tried not to use it too much; I like the idea of just mixing a bunch of different colours together and letting the contrast create movement in the design.
This last version reminds me a little of Sunday sketch #146 – some zig zagging, lots of angles, and a similar palette.
This week’s designs use quarter-rectangle triangles and some borders. Given the complicated colour placement, it might be easier to use paper piecing (which is how I made Avalanche), although if you were organised enough, you could probably make the QRTs the usual way without too much fuss. I haven’t used the HuRTy ruler to make QRTs yet, but I really want to!
Sunday sketch #274
This week’s design isn’t overly original, but I enjoyed playing with this concept and felt like sharing it.
I’ve played with these split quarter-square triangles and split quarter-rectangle triangles before – see Sunday sketches #166 and #188, for example (two of my favourite sketches!). I really love these shapes and how they create movement in a design.
I also love how your eye is drawn to different sets of lines, depending on colour palette and placement. In the top design, I look at those diagonal lines first, but in the bottom one, my eye’s drawn to the vertical lines instead.
Split quarter-square triangles are easy to make – just cross a half-square triangle with a solid square. Ditto for the split quarter-rectangle triangles, although I must admit I’ve never actually made one. I’d probably paper-piece them instead, just to be more precise (and save all the fabric wastage I often seem to get when I make HRTs two at a time).
Sunday sketch #206
A bit of a palate cleanser this week.
I find designs like this one – and this colour palette – very calming.
But I think I shy away from creating minimalist designs because I know that in the real world, they’d need to be quilted eventually… and neither my quilting skills nor my budget to pay a longarmer are good enough right now. So this is definitely an example of how my own sewing skills dictate my designs to some extent (just like how it took me a long time to design anything with curves).
The vast majority of my designs are things that I know I could make myself (if I had the time, could be bothered, etc.). I need to try harder to design things that are beyond my sewing abilities – I need some stretch goals!
Anyway, back to this design. The secondary shapes and lines that emerge – like the hint of two vertical lines created by all those meeting points between quarter-rectangle triangles, as well as those broad diagonal lines slashing back and forth – make me happy.
These designs are just quarter-rectangle triangle blocks interspersed with rectangles and then pieced with large borders. It would be relatively easy to make this design pretty much any size you wanted. The hard part would be settling on just two fabrics to work with 🙂
