Nearly seven years back, I blogged a post titled “Insights Into A Gridaholic’s Process” with this illustration of a grid of squares I printed off and filled in with various pencil markings to build patterns and fillings for future consideration. I photographed the sheet, then tucked it away somewhere, and I’m sure it will come to the top again, but in the meantime I have this image of it.

Rediscovering it yesterday, I was pleasantly surprised to see I’ve used quite a few of them either as hand stitched parts of a surface design, or as hand quilting patterns. (I don’t do much machine quilting now, except for occasional non-decorative quilting that isn’t seen or obvious) Clearly some of these things are glued in my mind, and several could be really interesting as part of a repeat block/grid design; others could be adapted for ‘sashing’ boundaries outlining grid units.

I have another sheet template I can print off for larger units, with six squares to an A4 page, that I use for improv repeat unit diagram ideas, and these examples to show how I use this –