Tagged: rectangles
Quilt pattern: Interstellar
My second quilt pattern has just been published in issue 179 of Down Under Quilts! Even though I submitted my first two patterns to different magazines a few months apart, they ended up coming out within a week of each other.
Interstellar was inspired by Sunday sketch #23, which featured strips and squares cascading down the page.
Translating a design into a pattern isn’t always easy. I don’t usually think about how each Sunday sketch could be made as a quilt until after I’ve finished the design – sometimes the construction ends up being fairly simple, while other times it’s more complicated or even too difficult to contemplate.
As I thought about how to make this design into a pattern, I realised that following my sketch faithfully would require too many partial seams and fabric pieces of different sizes. I’m sure there are many advanced quilters out there who’d relish the challenge, but I’m not one of them. So instead, I refined the design to minimise the number of fabric pieces and make the piecing a bit simpler. It might still look complicated, but the pattern actually comes together really quickly and easily.
Depending on the colour scheme and gradation, it could be a waterfall (blues and whites), a comet tail (bright whites on a dark background), a burst of fireworks (saturated colours against a night sky) or even unicorn barf (a rainbow of bright colours against a light background):
Interstellar is perfect for solids or patterned fabrics, and an ideal way to use up some of your scraps. Issue 179 of Down Under Quilts is on sale now!
Sunday sketch #40
Following on from last week’s theme of layered triangles with a pop of colour:
Once again, the red triangles are placed purposefully, with their sides all aligning. The pattern is symmetrical; turning it 180 degrees will end up with the same design.
The logical next step in this series of sketches was to flip the triangles, so you see their flat bases rather than their pointy heads:
I think this design would’ve been better with the red triangles in each column touching tips – without that white space in the middle. Lesson learned.
Both designs could be made using half-square triangles and rectangles; you could also save some seams in the top design by using flying geese as well.
Sunday sketch #39
I’m still exploring layered triangles, this time with a pop of colour.
When looking through any series of designs from one of my sketching sessions, I can fairly easily see the progression in my approach, from the more routine and regular to the slightly less conventional (at least, for me). In this series, I started with the red triangles all sitting on a single horizontal line across the middle of the page, then tried them in a diagonal position instead. Note that the angled edges of the triangles still all line up though – there’s only so much irregularly I can handle!
The design at the top of this post has rotational symmetry around the centre: flip it around 180 degrees and it looks the same. The second design (above) looks quite different when you flip it upside-down (below):
I drew it with the red arrows facing up, but I think I might prefer it with them facing down. Of course, if you made this into a quilt, you could just turn it around depending on your mood.
Like the other triangle designs, these could be made from half-square triangles (and, optionally, flying geese) and rectangles, with sashing.
