Design Exercise the First

 As part of a new small group I'm a member of, I had to make a small piece incorporating three symbols that each of us chose. I chose a spiral, which surprised no one. The other two members chose a kind of S shape (not-exactly sine wave but close) and a triangle.  We were all recently reading the book
Design By Nature: Using Universal Forms and Principles in Design by Maggie Macnab (I highly recommend this book!, It is very well done and thought-provoking), and we adapted some of the ideas about design and pattern into this group exercise.  It was really interesting to see what the other two group members came up with, all three were completely different.

I started out first with a three part background all in greys. I kept the irregular edges of the fabric pieces 'as-is' for visual interest.

The shapes were quilted and drawn in each section, spiral, S-shape and then triangle. I drew the shapes with a fabric marker, and added the dots at all the corners of the triangles because of a pen mistake.  That made me think of architectural style drawings, so I went back and drew over the shapes, adding fig.1, etc.

My original plan was that this would be the background and I'd add additional fabric shapes on top of all this.  But I was pretty happy with how it looked at this point so I stopped there.  This end design turned out to not combine the shapes quite as much as I really wanted to though. I will probably try this exercise again as I found it really useful and I'd like to see what else I could come up with.