It’s been ages since I’ve used Excel to create a quilt design! Sunday sketch #194 was the last one I shared with you.

This week’s design is a fairly simple one inspired by a cable-knit sweater that my husband noticed on a TV show (French spy drama ‘The Bureau’ – so good!). I liked how the strands twisted together then separated to create new twists, and so on and so forth. Because I knew the design would be all straight lines, Excel seemed like the fastest way to get the idea from my head onto the screen. After a bit of trial and error, I created this design with parallel twists. I used four colours, so it’s easier to see how each strand moves from one side of the design to the other.

Those horizontal areas of criss-crossed lines, where the strands stretch between two twists, add an interesting bit of negative space. In this design, green is always paired with yellow, and red is always paired with blue.

But then I realised that instead of crossing over in the middle like that, the strands could just twist around each other again. This creates a staggered but more consistent design. And note how each colour is paired with two others now: yellow with green and red; green with yellow and blue; red with blue and yellow; and blue with red and green. Of course, parallel lines never meet, so red is never paired with green, nor yellow with blue.

It’s a bit like a chain-link fence too, I guess (with a few too many turns per twist).

This is one of very few Sunday sketches where I haven’t figured out how to make the design into a quilt pattern. Of course, you could just chop up lots of rectangles and squares and piece them together. But I wanted a construction method where each coloured rectangle could be kept intact, as a single piece of fabric. I’m not sure there’s a way to do that without requiring partial seams or Y-seams. I’ll keep thinking about it!