Tagged: square

Sunday sketch #347

Here are the diamonds I mentioned last week. I’ve simplified the inside of the block by removing the half-square triangles (they’re just coloured as squares now), which also removes the internal octagon. (This is all compared to the past few week’s sketches; if you’ve no idea what I’m on about, start with Sunday sketch #344 and go from there!)

This first version feels like overlapping lace to me… that circular movement, and all the dark blocks overlaid on a white background.

Making the internal stars white instead of dark blue helps to lighten the whole design, although I feel like the overlapping effect isn’t as prominent. As usual, I can’t decide which one I prefer.

And here’s a throwback to last week’s design, with the internal octagon shape back again and the diamonds coloured in the opposite way to the background.

I like how an element that wasn’t even really obvious in previous versions of this block is now the most prominent. It just goes to show the difference that colour (and colour placement) can make in a design.

I’m sure I could go for another few weeks, tweaking this design to create new sketches, but you get the idea. If a block has enough elements, you can add and subtract small components to make a big difference to the overall design. And then one design sparks another, which sparks another… ad infinitum.

I’d love to see some of these designs as actual quilts. They’d be easy to construct – they’re just half-rectangle triangles, half-square triangles and triangle-in-a-square units – and they’re all block-based, so you could batch-sew similar components and/or pieces of the same colour. (I love planning how I’ll approach a new project 🙂 )

Sunday sketch #337

I don’t have too many designs up my sleeve at the moment, and when I sat down recently to draw something new, I ended up rehashing an old sketch.

This week’s design is a reworking of Sunday sketch #318, which I posted in July. I introduced some curves, which actually make the whole design simpler to construct as a quilt.

The shapes kinda remind me of Christmas crackers too: long rectangles (or cyclinders) capped by triangles at both ends.

Like the original sketch, this one illustrates the Bezold effect – an optical illusion where a colour (in this case, orange) looks slightly different depending on which colours are next to it. I didn’t know there was a name for this until Carolina Oneto mentioned it in a comment on my Instagram post for Sunday sketch #324 (obviously it’s an effect I use a fair bit!).

Anyway, this sketch could be made into a quilt using flying geese, half circles (or quarter-circles or drunkard’s paths units) and squares. I think it’d be much easier to make than the original sketch on which it’s based!

 

Sunday sketch #332

Is it cheating to post a Sunday sketch for the first time after I’ve made a quilt from it? (I guess not really, since I make the rules haha!)

I designed this sketch awhile ago, when planning what three quilts I’d contribute to ‘The Before Times’, an exhibition at the Wangaratta Art Gallery in Victoria, Australia, from 12 November to 18 December 2022.

The exhibition is curated by Tara Glastonbury (@stitchandyarn) and features work from six artists. We were each free to interpret the theme of ‘The Before Times’ in our own way. I thought about geometry and going back to the most basic of shapes: triangles, rectangles and ellipses. I designed each quilt around a single shape, and this week’s sketch is the basis of the ‘square’ quilt (which I’ll post about in more detail later).

I’ve talked before about how imposing constraints on designing can actually be helpful. When you’re allowed to move in any direction, indecision can leave you standing still. But when you can only go in a specific direction, it can be easier to move forward.

Squares are the most basic of shapes in patchwork, and there are a million (or more!) quilt designs that use only squares to great effect. It took me awhile to come up with something interesting that I felt like I hadn’t seen before, then even more time to find a colour palette I liked.

I love how the squares look like those crocheted squares that interlock at their edges.

The actual quilt that I made looks a little different – I added some asymmetrical borders and used a different colour palette. The design works well in a lot of different colourways – basically any four colours that go together but have sufficient contrast so that adjacent colours don’t blend into one another too much.

I always have a bit of fun using the ‘Randomize’ feature in Electric Quilt 8… more often than not, the output is a bit yuck, but occasionally I find a colour combo that I can tweak.

This quilt design can be made into a quilt using big squares and small squares. I actually sewed long strips together then subcut them to make the outer edges of each block (the alternating small squares). The same pairs of colours appear throughout, so that was a much faster way of doing it.

I called the quilt based on this sketch ‘Tetrapacked’, as a nod to the basic shape. I’m not sharing too much about it online yet, because I’ve also submitted it to QuiltCon 2023. So if you want to see it, you can head to the Wangaratta Art Gallery to see ‘The Before Times’ exhibition 🙂