Month: November 2024

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And the Sewing Begins

I found sky blues. Seven of them, to be exact. A new-to-me quilt store in Rhode Island had a whole wall of solids, and I was able to come up with the blues I needed. They have all been washed and cut, and I have sewn all of the sky blue strips together. I actually really like the shading of the seven sky blues in order. I would have liked to have more subtle transitions from one fabric to the next, but barring my ability to find an appropriate blue ombre (no one seems to think this exists), I’m going to have to claim artistic license here.

The sky blues, once I found them, were easy. They go in the same order every time, so I was able to just sew them together in strips. (Strip piecing FTW!) It’s those mountain blues that are going to be the death of me. I sewed five of them together. It took me a whole evening. Granted, mistakes were made, and the seam ripper got a workout. But the picture below shows one evening’s worth of work.

(I swear the darks are really blue and not black!)

Five down, fifty left to go!

The pieces you see are double wide – I have not yet cut them in half to produce the mirror image that goes below the waterline. So this is not what the final thing will look like. But it is definitely an approximation. 

I am not 100% sure I’m happy with it yet. I feel like I need darker sky blues (which I do have), and I feel like it’ll look very different once I cut these pieces in half. I need some time (maybe this weekend?) when I can devote a day to just working on this and fiddling with it while I keep track of what works and what doesn’t.

One thing I am rather pleased with is the clear difference between the mountain blues and the sky blues. I was worried that there wouldn’t be a clear difference, but I absolutely see it. I think it also helps that the sky blues are two-inch blocks while the mountain blues are one-inch blocks. I think the contrast between the size and the color is very clear, at least here, with these blues. My opinion may change once I get into the center of the image, where the blues are lighter and it will be harder to tell them apart when they’re next to each other. But that is a long time away. I’ll get there eventually, but at the rate I’m going, it’ll be well into next year.

One of these days, my life will calm down, I’ll get my weekends back, and I’ll have time to really dig into this and get into a rhythm to get a lot done. One of these days…

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What Do I Do With All of Those Blues?

So…once I find all of those blues, I actually have to DO SOMETHING with them. Remember: this is a bargello project. I’m still firmly convinced of that, even after I had to make a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet, folks. I must be off my rocker.

The first thing I did for this quilt was project the image on a wall where I’d taped a large piece of paper. I used the image to draw a rough outline of the shapes I wanted to mimic in the final quilt. The image on paper is 30” high and about 54” wide, so that is what the final quilt will be as well. 

A couple of weeks ago, I sat down with a ruler and laid out horizontal lines an inch apart from the water line to the top of the mountains in the image. The water line is 16” from the top of the image, so the image is slightly top-heavy – more of the image depicts above the water line than below it – but the water is basically a mirror, so what I do on the top of the image will be mirrored below the water line. The mountains aren’t really a large part of the image – I think the largest mountains in the image only extend 6-7” above the water line. The rest is sky.

The sky will be fairly “standard” – it will be like a traditional bargello in that it will be the same colors, in the same order, simply staggered to create the appearance of movement. (Remember that I have mother-of-pearl buttons to create the clouds in the sky, so much of the sky will be covered by “clouds.”) 

In a traditional bargello quilt, the height of the blocks is usually standardized – 1” finished, in most cases, but sometimes 2” finished. The width, however, varies depending on the effect that the pattern needs to create – a steeper angle needs pieces with smaller widths, while flatter curves can use wider pieces.

To create the mountains for this quilt, I squared off the contours of the mountains into 1”, or sometimes ½”, pieces, and varied the widths according to the changes in the coloring. I’d already assigned the six muted blues – I think I’ll call them mountain blues – to parts of the traced image, so all I had to do was number each of the squared-off pieces with the number of the mountain blue that it covered. I ended up with 54 columns of widths varying from ½” to 2”.

Here’s where it gets complicated. In a traditional bargello, the colors stay the same and appear in the same order. In this one, not a single one of the 54 columns is going to be the same as any other (except its mirror image below the water line). And therein lies the challenge…and the spreadsheet.

I labeled each column with a letter. And when I ran out of letters, I doubled them (AA, BB, etc.). And when I ran out of those (I didn’t use I, II, O, and OO for somewhat obvious reasons), I used the three extra letters in the alphabet of another language I speak, and doubled those as well. (Fortunately, I ran out of columns about the same time I ran out of letters and didn’t have to resort to Cyrillic.) I put each of those into a spreadsheet. I wrote down the width of the column, added a seam allowance, and doubled it (for its mirror image below the water line), and then I wrote down the number of 1” and ½” strips of each color that I would need. The spreadsheet is detailed. I am a dork, but I am an organized dork, at least on paper.

This is what the paper drawing looks like with all of my scribbling on it.

In the image, the water line is the straight line on the left, and the squiggly lines are the original tracing of the actual image. The rectangles with numbers in them will be pieces in the quilt; the numbers represent the blues – the higher the number, the darker the blue. The open space to the right is sky.

I hope it still makes sense to me when I sit down to actually sew the dang thing together.