So. You remember that I’m in a quilting bee called Pollen8? And that we each get to choose a theme for everyone else to do for our month? My month is a LOOOOoooOOooong way away (November) but I can’t stop wondering if it’s possible to have 8 different people do bargello-style blocks and have them come together in a cohesive quilt top.
If I gave really specific instructions, it’d be no problem, but I want everyone to imbibe their blocks with their own style. Some of us are very traditional, some are very exacting, some are very playful…and each of us should be free to do our own thing in these blocks.
That being said, I decided to put together a very quick and dirty tutorial for this style of block construction. Most people in our bee haven’t tried it, and neither have I! I also want to do the tutorial so that I can just make sure it’s even doable within the framework of our bee. Each person need to do 3 blocks. Is that going to work out given the method of construction??
To start off with, I made a little flickr mosaic of other peoples’ bargello quilts:
1. My Bargello Winner, 2. Meu Bargello, 3. Meu bargello de outro ângulo, 4. bargello baby quilt, 5. Rainbow Bargello Placemat (front), 6. Mini Bargello, 7. Christmas bargello, 8. Cate A.’s bargello in greens, 9. 11 Gail and John’s Bargello 006 smaller, 10. Holly Beth’s Bargello, 11. cheating bargello, 12. teensy bargello
Created with fd’s Flickr Toys
This is a good thing to do because it gives both myself and the other pollen8ers ideas as to how to construct the squares. You don’t have to line them up perfectly, or in rainbow order, or even tonally…just do what you like. (Though being perfect is obviously acceptable, and even seems to be the norm!)
My next step is just to practice the technique. I decided to look through my fabric and see what I had that was already cut in regular strips. I wanted something pre-cut because this is, after all, a quick and dirty tutorial…I didn’t want to spend all day on this! The only thing I had was this jellyroll of batiks in autumnal colors. I’m not really feeling autumn right now as it’s in the 90s today, but let’s just go with it.
Next, I laid out my fabrics next to each other and decided on an order. I didn’t go tonal or anything, but just placed one batik strip next to one non-batik strip over and over. I’m starting with just a few strips because I’m just doing something small here for an example. If this was a real quilt, I might just sew up the whole jellyroll into one big long piece.
This created one solid piece of fabric. I joined the fabric long side to long side, and stitched it into a cylinder.
I cut the cylinder into strips around its circumference. These can be either regular or irregular widths, as you can see from the mosaic above.
The next thing to do is to open up the resultant loops into strips. This is the key step in the whole thing. You have to open each strip up at a slightly different place, typically one square farther up the strip than the last one. I just used a seam ripper to separate them.
But, as you can see from the examples in my mosaic, you can also cut partially through the squares, too. And, by changing the series of your opening (going up or down the order of the squares) you can change the look of the bargello and create waves, diagonals, and curves.
I was sure to lay these out carefully in the order that I wanted them to be sewn, so I didn’t lose my place or mix up the order.
I stitched them together …
And I have my (very simplified) bargello!
It’s really not that difficult, and I think that even though it’s based on a grid-type layout, there’s still room for creativity both in piecing and cutting.
I also think that as long as the fabrics coordinate, having 8 people making 8 different styles of blocks would only add to the uniqueness and cool factor of the finished quilt top.
Before it’s my month, I’d like to experiment a little more in both cutting and piecing. I want to try out some of the different styles in the mosaic, and see what happens.
ETA: As is typical for me, I couldn’t stop making these blocks until I had enough to actually stitch them together and see how they’d look as one quilt top. As of now, I have 12 blocks and have convinced myself to STOP. I’m going to sash and stitch them and will give you an update when the little wall quilt is finished. For now, here’s a mosaic of a few of them:
Some are more successful than others. I prefer the ones where I can pick out the zigzag in the ordering, but I like the others just fine, too.
They’re all different, but I that together, they’ll make a cohesive piece.
