Tagged: square
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.
Sunday sketch #352
This week’s design is an iteration of last week’s; I’ve basically just removed the curves and added large squares in their place. Oh, and I lightened the whole design by swapping the colouring of the light and dark elements.
One issue with this sketch is that the elements that look like blocks – basically a large coloured square with four smaller units at the corners – overlap with each other at those corners, which makes colouring in a little difficult. Apart from the very first ‘block’ at the top left (I’m putting ‘block’ in quotes because technically, the way I designed this sketch, they’re not blocks), every other block is ‘missing’ at least one of its elements in its own colour; the adjacent block(s) overlap with their own colour(s). I don’t think it’s super-obvious here, and I’ve tried to follow the rule that the ‘block’ to the left/top takes precedence in terms of colouring, but… I don’t love the fact that this is a feature of this design. It just means an extra step of thinking when it comes to colour, which I try to avoid 🙂 I also think it would be a pain to try and explain in a pattern, for example. (Which makes me realise that even though I haven’t decided whether or not to publish my own patterns, I do tend to think about these things whenever I’m designing a sketch.)
Anyway. Those internal spaces feel a little ’empty’ to me, so I tried filling them with more squares. I feel like the dark squares are too dark, but the coloured squares make the overall design feel a little too jumbly (is that a word?).
Maybe another shape would fit in there? The curves worked last week because they don’t introduce any straight lines to compete with the squares, and squares work this week because… well, they’re just more squares, and the new lines they create are parallel to the existing lines. So I’m not sure what else could work in there.
Anyway, here are a few versions where I’ve swapped the light and dark elements back to their original placement from last week. Instead of the inner squares being dark, they’re in colour, and the large bars framing each of the coloured squares are black. (Actually I used charcoal here, to lighten the whole design just a smidge.)
Again, those internal spaces feel a little empty to me. Here are two versions with the dark and colour squares instead.
This week’s sketch, like last week’s, was originally designed using two different blocks in a standard layout, not the same block on point (despite how it looks). But obviously, once I’ve removed the curves from last week’s design, this version could be made much more easily using a single block that’s set on point. In that case, you’d be using a modified nine-patch block, and all you’d need are squares and rectangles, with some triangles for the empty spaces along the edges and at the corners.
This is one of those designs where I was fairly sure it must’ve been done before – I mean, it’s just a modified nine-patch. I did a quick search on Pinterest and Google and didn’t find anything exactly the same, but that’s by no means exhaustive. I’d be surprised if there isn’t something similar out there in quilt land. If you know of a pattern like this week’s sketch, let me know and I’ll update this blog post!
