Tagged: square
Sunday sketch #241
What do you think of the 2021 Pantone Color(s) of the Year? (Me? Meh.)
The Pantone Color Institute picked yellow (‘Illuminating’) and grey (‘Ultimate Gray’) for its colours this year. (It’s not the first time they’ve chosen two instead of one; in 2016 they selected baby pink and baby blue (sorry… ‘Rose Quartz’ and ‘Serenity’). Ugh.)
Anyways… I figured I’d try the yellow/grey combo in a design! I’m always on the lookout for new colour combinations. (And the first quilt I ever made was in yellow and grey prints, so I have a soft spot for this palette.)
I’ve been experimenting with block-based designs based on only two blocks – it’s an interesting visual exercise, and a good way to find unexpected secondary shapes.
I’m always fascinated by how colouring a design differently can give a quilt pattern a whole new look. But what’s great about this design is that colouring the pieces in the same way, but in a different palette, also produces a different effect. In the version above, the grey diamonds create a ripple effect of concentric (almost) circles. But in the version below, when the colours are switched, the white diamonds don’t have quite the same effect.
But this design is also a perfect example of how colouring the pieces differently can create a completely different look and feel. I added another 2 rows and columns of alternating blocks to the design below, but it’s the same checkerboard arrangement of only 2 blocks. It somehow seems a bit more complicated when colours are split between blocks, pulling some together and pushing others apart.
And we can complicate things even further…
Look at all that movement! And all of it comes from colour placement; it’s the exact same design as the version before it. I love it!
This design could be made into a quilt quite easily, as it’s just 2 square blocks repeated in an alternating arrangement. One block comprises 2 diamond shapes (or 4 triangle-in-a-square units). The other block is a cross block with a square in the middle, which could be constructed in a number of ways.
Sunday sketch #195
I hope you’re all hanging in there, wherever you are in the world and however much coronavirus has disrupted your life and livelihood.
This week’s sketch is another super-simple one with lots of potential for colourplay and even different blocks.
Angle your head by 45 degrees and you can see that these are just square blocks arranged on point. Most of the blocks are either white background or coloured foreground squares. The other blocks are half-snowballs (basically a square with two opposite corners lopped off) and diamond shapes.
I originally started with the two easiest shapes, which might make the grid layout more obvious:
And, since it feels a bit like a chandelier or necklace, I played around with some negative space too…
This would be a great design for a quick and simple scrappy quilt. Many of us have a lot more time up our sleeves now, so feel free to whip one up if you’ve got the scraps!
Sunday sketch #192
A very basic block this week, which is just an excuse to play with colour and arrangement.
Now, diagonally bisecting a star block is not new. Sometimes I’m confident that a Sunday sketch is unique, or different, or surprising, or unexpected. This is not one of those times. I scoured Pinterest and didn’t find anything exactly the same, but this design is so basic that I’m convinced it’s out there. So you may have seen something like this before. For example, Suzy Quilts has a gorgeous pattern called Stars Hollow with blocks that feature a white sawtooth star against a diagonally bisected, coloured background. (If you’ve seen other similar designs, comment on this post and I’ll add links.)
Anyway… my purpose for posting this today is because I was interested in all the different ways this simple block can be arranged and coloured using my usual restricted palette of 1–2 colours (1–3 if you count white, which I guess we have to). So here goes.
I find the first design striking because it almost looks like a block in shadow – with light coming from the bottom right, angled up to the darkness at the top left. It’s super-simple but a bit complicated too.
But then I tried introducing a second colour (I usually ignore white, but I guess that’s technically the second colour (even though it’s not a colour…), making green the third colour):
The top half of each star is the same as before – white on blue – but the bottom half is now green instead of blue. I find that this colouring helps me to delineate those diagonal stripes a bit more easily, which then makes me want to make them even more obvious:
In both those designs, I recoloured the stars so that their tops and bottoms create clear diagonal stripes. I prefer alternating a single colour with white; I found that two stripe colours (the background behind the stars) was a little overwhelming.
Then I went back to the original block design, which had a solid top half and a white bottom half. By alternating the colouring for each block, I could still hang on to those clear diagonal stripes.
I also tried another design that kept the diagonal stripe but made it a bit more subtle. I started with the original block again, but recoloured some of the star tops and bottoms.
And finally, I mixed things up a bit more by alternating blocks with all-solid or all-white backgrounds, then colouring them to bring back those stripes.
I always love seeing how a single block can produce so many different designs just using different colour placement. I think that’s one of the things that makes quilting so interesting for me – seeing how a single design can be interpreted in so many ways.
These designs could be translated into quilt patterns using triangle-in-a-square blocks, half-square triangles, and squares. That’s it!
