Cobwebs & Diamonds

From the Indiana Project & the Quilt Index

Last week I showed variations of this complicated pattern pieced of triangles we call flying geese. The combination of sashing and block gives an interesting all over design.

I also showed this block view of a similar design without sashing.

BlockBase #3842, The Spider Web

I noticed several related patterns that were published as block views. Instead of triangular geese

the strips are full of parallelograms (not really diamonds.)

Eveline Foland's Christmas Star for the Kansas City Star in 1932 might be the best example. She showed an octagonal block and to avoid questions of repeat suggested readers make one block as a sofa pillow.

It's BlockBase #3791 and related to several other octagonal designs.

You can right click on a block and make a Quick Quilt to see what the repeat would be.

BlockBase #3789

BlockBase #3791

These are cool but the block just doesn't give you

the cobweb kind of repeat.

I imported the BlockBase patterns into EQ to recolor and set them in different ways.

Here's Foland's Christmas Star as a square block repeated.

The shading makes it closer to the cobweb effect.

What if you just pieced octagons and set them together?

Oops. I always forget that octagons won't tessellate. There is a

square hole there.

What if....

I added sashing of the same size strips in Photoshop.

The sash is about 1/4 of the width of the block.

That is very cool if you like piecing parallelograms.

You could probably shade that another way and get the cobweb

effect.

And this is why I never get any sewing done. Too much thinking about

potential projects. I'd rather draw parallelograms than sew them.