Tagged: square

Sunday sketch #370

I’ve been doing a lot of (what feel like) fairly simple designs lately, but I’m enjoying playing with basic shapes and palettes. I’m big into sticking circles (or pseudo-circles) around stuff – this week, it’s crosses.

I used a similar shape in Sunday sketch #131 (way back in December 2018!), but haven’t really played with it since. But I really like it.

It’s not quite a circle, not quite a squircle, but 4 quarter-circles (or drunkard’s path units) around a cross shape. Using a centre square in the middle of the cross increases the opportunity for interesting colour placement.

And those squares can be echoed in the sashing between the blocks, too. The design works without them, I guess, although it’s maybe not as interesting?

I’ve used a mixed palette here, but a more limited palette would work too.

I also removed some of the circles and retained the crosses – just to add some negative space and draw the eye around the design a bit.

There’s lots of potential with this design – lots of ways you could play with the palette and colour placement. I love simple, clean designs like this! They’re not earth-shattering from a design perspective, but very satisfying (to me, at least).

All you’d need are quarter-circles (or drunkard’s path units), squares and rectangles. I know a lot of people don’t like sashing, but I don’t mind it. I add it to a lot of my designs to break up adjacent blocks and avoid overcrowding. (Sorry!) But otherwise I think this week’s sketch would be a fairly easy make.

Sunday sketch #369

More eight-pointed stars this week! These are the ones that the Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns by Barbara Brackman calls the ‘sun ray’s quilt’ block. And all the blocks called ‘eight-pointed stars’ in the book (and there are many!) look completely different to this one (and to each other…). But I’m sticking with ‘eight-pointed star’.

This is one of those apparently simple designs that I feel is a bit more complex on closer inspection. Each of the two blocks in each quadrant extend into the two adjacent quadrants. For example, at the top left, the orange squares continue on into the top-right quadrant, while the light stars against an orange background continue down to the bottom-left quadrant. At the top right, the orange stars against a light background continue down the design, while the orange squares continue across. It’s the same for each quadrant; they’re all connected.

I’ve used just two colours, as a larger palette would disrupt that connectivity. I’m really stuck on this dark green / light blue palette recently.

I’ve talked before about how I need to consciously ‘modernise’ a quilt design by taking elements away, introducing asymmetry, etc. So here’s my attempt at a ‘modern’ version of this one. It’s perhaps still a bit too balanced. I should’ve tried making the placement of blocks in each quadrant a bit more random.

I’ll never get tired of the bright orange and hot pink palette.

In EQ8, there’s a ‘Randomize’ feature where you can just click on a design and it’ll serve you up different colour palettes. Over and over and over again. It does seem pretty random; more often than not, they’re not very nice! But occasionally something interesting pops up. Here are a few I tried myself or stumbled upon by randomising.

I tried a few more iterations of this design too, by mixing up the placement of the stars and their backgrounds. I liked this checkerboard variation.

This week’s sketches could be made into quilts using eight-pointed stars (which require either half-rectangle triangles or a triangle-in-a-square block, plus a square) and solid squares. I mentioned last week that I wasn’t sure how small I could make an eight-pointed square and be happy with the precision; I have a feeling that the seams could feel kinda bulky in a very small star? I’ll have to try it and see.

Sunday sketch #360

I’ve been playing with curves lately, so expect more curvy designs in the coming weeks. This week’s sketch is a trippy drippy design based on a repeating block.

I tried this design in a few different colourways, and found that the best palette comprised different shades of the same colour. I also found that it worked best with the darker colour up top, with the gradation lightening as you descend the page.

The designs I’ve shown here use a 4 × 4 layout with top and bottom borders. The blocks are made using half-circles (or 2 × drunkard’s path units), squares and rectangles. If you wanted to recreate this design, you wouldn’t necessarily have to use a single repeated block; you could mix up the lengths of the drips and make it a bit less repetitive.