How Hard Is It

To Design A New Block?

Part 5 (Grids Inside Grids Inside Grids)

You can look at a quilt and think, "This is complex; it must have been hard to design." But a quilt may look complex and still be easy to design if each step in the process is a simple one.

Let's "reverse design" a quilt. We'll take it apart and look at the blocks to see how it was designed.

Ignore the border and you can see that this quilt is designed on a 2x2 grid with a single block in each of the 4 quadrants; the block is rotated 90 degrees each time.

Now let's take that block apart.

The block is also designed on a 2x2 grid and is made of 4 smaller blocks.

The block in the upper left and the block in the lower right are the same except that they are colored differently.

The block in the upper right and the block in the lower left are the same except that they are mirror images of each other.

The first block is designed on a 2x2 grid and is made of 4 blocks.

These blocks are all the same but colored differently

The second block is designed on a 2x2 grid and is made of 4 blocks.

These blocks are the same as the ones above and again they are colored differently.

So what it all comes down to is this simple block that is made from 2 squares and 2 half-square triangles. This block is repeated over and over in different combinations and using different colors to make the quilt.

How hard is it to design a block as simple as this? Not very hard.

How hard is it to play with 4 of them to create various larger blocks? Not very hard.

How hard is it to play with those larger blocks to create even larger blocks? Not very hard.

Designing blocks, and designing quilts, doesn't have to be hard. If you start with something simple and play with it, you will soon find wonderful things happening.

To see how this quilt was designed originally, go to My Posts by Subject in the sidebar on the right and click on Sawtooth Star then start at 10/24/10.