Tagged: squircles
Sunday sketch #466
This week’s sketch is another design that let me use lots of colours – well, up to six, which is a lot for me 🙂
It’s a block-based design, and each block has three distinct elements: four small circles, four orange peel units, and an outer squircle encompassing everything. So a two-colour palette is possible (though not very interesting), but a palette of three or more colours is best.
Sunday sketch #382
I talked about lines last week, and here they are again.
Last week’s design emerged from this week’s – and you might be able to spot the similarities (hint: look at those curved nine-patches). But it took me a few steps to get there….
I’ve been thinking lately about the possibilities of combining two alternating blocks in a design, rather than tiling a single block across an entire design. So I started with a nine-patch and alternated it with a block in which all four corners have a curve pointing towards the centre, making a kinda fat cross shape (which I’ve coloured in warm tones here). In the next version, the blocks are laid out on point. Can you see where one block ends and the next begins?
Separating the arms of each shape (or maybe just the hands?) with a black line presents some alternative colouring options for the squares in the nine-patches.
I felt like making those thin lines more of a feature, so added a border around the nine-patch blocks. Now do you have a better idea of where each block ends and the next one begins?
As usual, I tried a standard layout instead of an on-point one, just to see if the design becomes more interesting. Hmmm… I don’t think so?
As before, those lines create lots of opportunities for playing with colour placement.
Even if I pare it back to a two-colour palette, you can see how many variations there could be.
But I decided that the design didn’t really benefit from those straight lines. Instead, I could echo the curves in the main shapes by surrounding the nine-patches with a squircle (a square-ish circle).
For some reason I prefer the cross shapes on point, but the squircles in a standard layout. So I opted to make a feature of the squircles, and used the standard layout.
As much as I love that multicolour palette of warm tones, I think this design also lends itself to a much simpler palette. I feel like that makes it easier to see the shapes and how they play with each other.
Like last week’s sketch, this week’s could be made using squares, rectangles, drunkard’s paths (or quarter-circles) and skinny strips. I’d find it difficult to sew all those skinny strips evenly and smoothly, I think; it would take a bit of practice. I don’t usually post sketches that I’d struggle to make myself, but I’m treating this week’s sketch as aspirational – I’d love to be able to use skinny strips in this way! I know it’s possible, but it’s something I’ll have to work on.
Sunday sketch #288
No, your eyes are not deceiving you – this week’s design features prints! I don’t think I’ve ever designed a Sunday sketch using prints before?! But I couldn’t help it this week.
(I probably should’ve posted this one before Christmas, since it’s kinda a festive palette somehow.)
This design is very much like Sunday sketch #224, but using squircles – squares with rounded off corners – instead of circles, and with the internal lines placed off-centre.
Because the lines within the squircle are off-centre, rotating the blocks changes the size and location of the secondary shapes. In the version above, there’s a big square in the centre, surrounded by rectangles and four smaller squares. In the version below, the small square’s in the middle, and the rectangles and four big squares surround it.
Of course, the design also works in solids, too.
The easiest way to make this design into an actual quilt would probably be to combine quarter-circle units with squares and rectangles as necessary. But that would mean three of the four parts of each squircle were made up of multiple pieces of fabric – so you’d get seams between pieces of the same fabric. That’s fine for solids, but not for plaids (which I’ve used in the top version). So I think I’d create templates for those pieces, so you could add a rounded corner to each one. I’m not entirely sure how I’d do that (I don’t think it’d be quite as easy as you might first imagine), so it might be worth me playing around with sometime. I do have some plaids that I need to use up, so this might be the design for them!
