Tagged: squares

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 #362

This week’s block is the same as last week’s, so I’m cheating a little bit by making a new Sunday sketch rather than rolling these designs into last week’s post. But hey, it’s my blog, and I can do what I want! 🙂

I’ve rotated the block to create these new shapes. They’re admittedly kinda odd, but I like them.

Rotating again creates these shapes – don’t they remind you of moose antlers?

Here’s the same design shifted over, so the four antler conglomerations appear in full.

I tried different palettes, too, but I think I prefer the first one.

And there’s the antler design without the interstitial stars. I kinda like them too though. They add just that little bit of visual interest to keep things fun.

Like last week’s designs, this week’s sketch could be made into a quilt using quarter-circles (or drunkard’s path units), half-circles (or 2 × drunkard’s path units), squares and rectangles.

I probably won’t make this one. At small-scale and from afar, the design looks a bit too much like it includes a motif that I always try to avoid. I only really noticed after I drafted this blog post and then looked at the thumbnail image on the list of upcoming posts. Oops. Let’s not go there.