This week’s sketch features rail-fence-like blocks with square-in-a-square units as the main element. The middle row or column of each block (depending on its orientation) is differentiated from the adjacent columns/rows by switching the colouring of the squares and background. This creates floating rectangular shapes within the design.

Here it is in red and white and in the reverse colourway.

I often like trying a design with a different block layout; in this case, setting the blocks on point. Now instead of running horizontally and vertically, those floating rectangles are sitting diagonally. And the background (or foreground?) grid is now a checkerboard.

Rather than having some of the floating rectangles only half-appearing (on the edges of the design), I’ve removed those ones so that the design has only complete rectangles.

I think from afar, this design can look like a bit of a jumble, until you look more closely and see that there’s some regularity to those floating shapes.

Removing some of the rectangles gives the eye a (little) bit of room to rest, and makes the remaining rectangles more of a feature. This might be something I’d do if I were submitting this design to a modern quilt show.

As the background (or foreground?) checkerboard pattern can be a bit overwhelming, I also tried removing some of it. This gives the eye much more room to rest. Ahhhhh.

This week’s sketch(es) could be made using squares, half-square triangles and quarter-square triangles. Despite describing the main block as including square-in-a-square units, I wouldn’t actually use those units to create this design; simple squares and HSTs/QSTs would be enough.