Tagged: squares
Sunday sketch #80
Recently I revisited some half-finished sketches for new ideas. I found a design for a circle of arrows that ends up looking a bit like a wreath – I’d never quite finished it, but knew how I wanted it to look. A bit more sketching, and I was happy with the block design. Tiling the block produces a simple pattern with some circular motion.
Removing the sashing between the blocks produces a slightly tighter design, with some more interesting secondary shapes.
These 9 x 9 blocks could be made using half-square triangles, squares and rectangles.
Sunday sketch #71
Back to Excel this week for a few flying geese.
Whenever I create a design that feels familiar, I have a look through my own Pinterest feeds to see if someone else has done something similar (in which case, I wouldn’t post mine). I couldn’t see any quilt patterns with this design, but that’s not to say none exists – just that I haven’t seen it yet.*
There’s lots of scope for colour play with this design – highlighting the flying geese or the diamond-like HST pairs between them.
The easiest way to make this sketch into a quilt would be to use flying geese in pairs to make squares, then stack the squares around a solid central square to make each block.
*Update [6 November 2017]: On a Monday-night Instagram scrolling session, I found a very similar block on @harriandbear‘s feed that Vanessa had made as part of the Project 48 Quilt in 2016. The block was designed by Keera Job, and you can see her version on her Instagram feed. It’s identical in appearance to the block that makes up this quilt design; the only difference is that Keera’s flying geese units are 1.5″ x 3″ (Project 48 quilt blocks measure 9″ finished), whereas I’d envisioned the flying geese as 3″ x 6″, which would make each block 18″ square. I don’t recall seeing Keera’s design before (even though I’m involved in Project 48 this year), but perhaps it lodged in my brain ages ago and just resurfaced recently. Or perhaps different people can inadvertently come up with similar quilt designs, particularly when using the same traditional quilting shapes.
Sunday sketch #70
Whenever I discover a new design idea, I tend to disappear down the rabbit hole of re-invention, playing with the theme over and over again until I feel like I’ve exhausted it. You can see that I’m not done yet with the current theme….
Like the past few Sunday sketches (#67, #68 and #69), I’ve combined two different groups of a single shape: the black shapes stick to a regimented grid, while the red shapes float around in random locations (as long as they don’t touch each other). The difference this week is that the shapes are smaller and spaced further apart, giving a calmer, slightly less frenetic outcome.
Then again, I tried the same design with squares, and it ended up feeling a little busier:
These designs could be translated into quilt patterns quite easily – using mostly half-square triangles for the first sketch, and all squares for the second.
