Tagged: squares
Sunday sketch #88
Last week I started playing around with nine-patches, and this week’s design is an extension of that theme.
The corner squares of each nine-patch are half-square triangles, which means you can squeeze adjacent nine-patches right up against each other. Just using two colours against a background colour (white, in this case) almost brings those crosses to the foreground!
This is a super-simple design that uses only squares, half-square triangles and a few rectangles for sashing. It’s block-based, so would be really quick and easy to make.
(ps. Can you tell that I bought Electric Quilt 8? I’m slowly getting to grips with it. I don’t find it very intuitive, so I haven’t made huge progress yet. Having said that, every time I sit down to practice with it, I seem to create at least one design that I’m happy with!)
Sunday sketch #87
Back to basics this week, with a very simple nine-patch on repeat.
Playing with the squares in the nine-patch creates some interesting shapes. I’ve used half-square triangles to get that overlaid grid effect, but you could even use quarter-square triangles in the centre, and half-square triangles for the other squares, so create a tighter grid pattern overall.
Sunday sketch #83
If you look closely at Sunday sketch #81, you can see that the inside halves of each arrow create a closed octagon in the centre of each block. I decided to take that part of the block (which kinda looks like a circular saw blade) and tile it on its own.
Of course, that tiling brings up some really interesting secondary shapes: octagons, zig-saggy diamonds, and some wonky 8-pointed stars. It can be easier to see them if I redo the sketch with reverse shading.
I think when I sketch by hand that I pay more attention to the shapes, and see more possibilities for alternative designs and colours than I would when I use Excel or Illustrator. Instead of just creating one block and cutting-and-pasting it to get repeats, I’m re-drawing it again and again, which gives me time to think about each line and how I might manipulate it to get something new.
This design could be made into a quilt pattern using half-square triangles and squares.
