Scale

I’ve been playing again.

I’ve been making smaller versions of the Sugar Block of the Month Club blocks. This project is partly inspired by fact that Amy Gibson has left final quilt design up to each quilter. That set me to thinking about how I could do something different and interesting with twelve pretty basic blocks. Around the same time I took a look at the March lesson from the Craftsy Block of the month, and Laura Nownes was talking about drafting and using it to resize a block.

Though I’m pretty comfortable with quilt math and don’t generally bother to draw everything out, this seemed like a good exercise to work on in front of the TV. The drawing above is for the quarter size block. That is, I reduced a 12 x 12 finished block to a 6 x 6 finished block.

Here is the same scaled down version of the January block.

Apparently some quilters are afraid of drafting, and that’s a shame because it can hold you back from designing your own quilts. The truth is, if you can draw it on eight to the inch graph paper, you can figure out how to cut it out with a quarter inch seam allowance. If you have never attempted drafting, just take a look at the March installment of the 2013 Craftsy Block of the Month. You will be surprised at how simple it can be. Then get busy thinking up your own blocks.

I kind of thought I was done with this experiment, but then I got to doodling and decided to draw a  3 x 3 block.

It seemed doubtful that I could manage crisp points on something so small, but voila! I think it would be fun to use all twelve blocks in three different sizes with quite a lot of negative space in between them all. It sure could lead to interesting quilting possibilities.