Tagged: strips

Sunday sketch #372

Every now and then I’ll come up with a design that I just LOVE, and this week’s Sunday sketch is the latest example. I am smitten! It’s the perfect combination of fun and quirky and happy 🙂

I started with one ‘cross-weave’ block that uses three horizontal and three vertical strips of colour against a background. They look cute in a standard layout with sashing.

Then I made a new cross-weave block in which a four horizontal and four vertical strips of colour makes nine internal squares. They look good too, but maybe less ‘cute’ somehow.

But sticking them together in an alternating layout introduces an element of imbalance that instantly makes the design feel a bit, well, wacky. It’s because I designed the blocks with the sashing included, and the size of the sashing is a smidge different between the two different block types. Nothing quite seems to line up perfectly.

Then I added a third block, which has five horizontal and five vertical strips of colour (and 16 internal squares of background colour). Adding a few of those into the mix changes things up again.

I love it in a monochrome palette too. It’s like a patchwork of patchwork!

When I sat down to actually think about how to construct this one, I realised it’d be a bit more complicated than it might first appear. I couldn’t find a standard block size (10″, 12″, 14″ or 18″, for example) that was easily divisible by all the different numbers of strips in each block. In each case, the measurements needed to be nudged up or down a smidge to get to a multiple of 0.25″ (I’m not interested in cutting 1/8 of an inch…! I know they’re marked on most quilting rulers, but… meh).

I could get around that by making the sashing of each block a different size (essentially using the sashing to ’round up’ the cross-weave bit to a standard block size). It’s not an insurmountable problem, but just an added layer of peskiness that might make this fun design a little less fun to make. I’m still very tempted to try though! The unevenness of the sashing is part of its charm, I think, so it wouldn’t matter if the measurements were all a little improv-y – as long as everything joined together OK.

I think this design could work well with prints as well as solids. I also think the actual construction could be fairly fast, once you’d figured out the dimensions you needed (and practiced your scant quarter-inch seam; any minor deviations in the size of your seam allowance would really add up quickly in a design like this). The more I talk about it, the more I can’t wait to try it!

Sunday sketch #335

More Excel designs this week. I wish I’d used a different colour in these designs – this blue feels too cold to me – but I’m too lazy to change it. (There’s probably a quick way to do a replace-all of coloured cells in Excel, but I’m too lazy to find it!)

I like this offset cross that appears in the centre of the design as a result of a series of corners lining up diagonally in all four quadrants. I guess the four quadrants of the design could be made using large log cabin blocks. The strips can be extended to the edge of the design too…

…or angled round more corners to create discrete rectangles. Now there are four more crosses in addition to the centre one.

There are other ways to play with that central cross. If you look closely at the next design, you can see that it’s a series of closed loops of varying length, connected to one another in pairs (apart from the four smaller rectangles floating at the far corners).

Or it can be simplified further – again retaining that central offset cross.

Like last week’s sketch, this week’s designs could be made into a quilt using long strips. I’d find it easiest to make up templates, and maybe even to use paper-piecing to get the strips sewn nice and straight.

Doing one of the simpler designs as a super-sized quilt would look great, I think. I’ll add it to my list… 🙂

Sunday sketch #334

I’ve been playing with Excel a bit lately. It’s a fast and easy way to create quilt designs that feature squares or strips. I just set the sizing of the rows and columns so that the cells are square, then fill the cells to create the shapes.

For whatever reason, I haven’t designed with other shapes much lately. I’ve been busy with quilty deadlines and work and life, and just haven’t made much time for intentional creativity. I’m not worried; I’ll get back to it. But for now, and maybe another week or two, the Sunday sketches might be a bit simpler. But no less interesting!

This is almost like a cross between Frequency (which Modern Patchwork magazine called Sound Maze) and Sunday sketch #194. Notice how the three columns are made from completely separate lines that don’t extend outside their own column? There are a few floating rectangles in the middle column too.

I kept playing with this concept, but decided to colour in some of the whitespace…

You can see that I changed a few things in the middle column in that one, too. I kinda like the balance in this one, but my eye can get a little lost in all those lines.

So I kept playing, and found a simpler variation. Again, the rows might look like they’re interacting, but they’re each made of a completely separate continuous line.

My Excel workbook has another 10 or so sheets in it with additional variations on this theme; it really does have endless possibilities. I’m not sure if I’d ever make one of these designs into a quilt – I find it difficult to piece long narrow strips and keep them all straight. But you never know!