In Sunday sketch #147, I came up with the idea of a bunch of lines converging to create an arrow shape. I didn’t explore it further at the time, because I veered off into other design territory instead. But since then, I’ve revisited that idea in a number of other designs. Here’s one.

When I drew this design, I felt like it might have been similar to one I’d done before… but then realised that I was thinking of Sunday sketch #74 – which also has thin strips coming from four directions to meet in the middle, but is otherwise fairly different.

If I were to tweak this design further (and I still might…), I’d remove that empty space in the middle, where the arrows meet.

This kind of design might suit bias tape appliqué, or just piecing lots of skinny strips. I know that my sewing skills aren’t up to either of those approaches just yet, but perhaps one day!

 

The main reason I didn’t work further on last week’s design is because I wanted to explore other new designs with the same theme. Here’s one: really simple stripes, creating a secondary shape in the centre.

This design could be made using long strips, such as jelly roll strips, angled at the ends and pieced together. It would take a little bit of effort to line up the edges.

 

Another idea that I jotted down while in Japan was a fairly simple sketch of straight lines coming together to create new shapes.

This is my first attempt; I didn’t play around with any more iterations because I got sidetracked by new ideas. But I think it could be interesting to make this design a little wider, with a bit more negative space at the bottom. And maybe even to position the central arrow motif slightly off centre, which would allow me to get those two top bars to point exactly into those top two corners (only one of which does so now).

Someone asked me on Instagram lately how I feel about asymmetry 🙂  I know I tend towards symmetrical designs, although sometimes a second or third iteration of a symmetrical design will introduce asymmetry. I work best with order, rules and regularity… but I’m trying to bust out some chaos when I can 🙂

This design would probably be easiest to make with long strips. It could be made using a loghouse cabin approach, I think, with some strips combining both the foreground and background colours.