Category: Planning the Quilts

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A Different Kind of Bargello

You’d think that sewing straight lines would be easy. You’d be wrong. I started working on the College Fjord quilt today, sewing more vertical strips onto the batting and backing. I realized after I’d worked for a while that somehow, I’d gone wonky. The top of what I’ve sewn together is now half an inch wider than the bottom. Still trying to figure out what exactly I want to do about that. I have three options: ignore it and move forward while not correcting for the discrepancy, try to correct for the difference as I move forward, or remove the strips back to where I’m pretty sure the wonkiness began and fix it. I was not up for making this decision today, so I put down the College Fjord quilt and started cutting up vertical strips for the Hus Ved Havet quilt.

First note on this one: seam allowances take up more space than I think when I estimate in my head. I estimated that the mountains/water of this image would only need one strip of each color, but it’s going to be a stretch. I still have several vertical columns to cut, and I think it’s going to be OK, but I may need to cut out more small pieces.

Second note: Apparently what I think is a quarter-inch seam allowance when I sew is more like a three-eighths seam allowance. Fortunately, I’m not following a pattern, and I am remarkably consistent when sewing, so the fact that my 1” blocks are actually more like ⅞” blocks is not a problem. I really need to mark a quarter inch on my sewing machine – just not until I’m done with this quilt.

Based on what I see so far, I think this is going to be a successful quilt.

When I look at this on the design wall from across the room, I see the mountains and water and land in the foreground, which of course is what I’m going for. The jury is still out on the bush (the green bump on the right) versus the rest of the green vegetation in the foreground, but I need to see those side-by-side before I make any judgment. There are many bits of this that haven’t been sewn together yet, so some things look weird, but I was mostly cutting and not sewing today, so the sewing will have to wait until another day.

What’s interesting to me about working on this version of a bargello quilt is that it’s not a mirror image like the College Fjord quilt, but it’s also not like a regular bargello in that the colors don’t “move.” In a regular bargello quilt, each color moves up and down in the vertical to create movement. There’s almost none of that here. The greens at the bottom do it – the dark green is always the one that’s closest to the blue of the water, but that blue changes depending on how far away from the water line it is. The blues of the water and the grays of the mountain stay still.

When I was working on this quilt on paper at my guild’s Open Sew, I asked the other folks who were there what they thought of keeping the colors in the same place across the mountains and water. I wondered if there would be enough movement in the quilt to create interest. Someone said that I could create that movement with the quilting, and that was an excellent reminder for me. Since I’ve been using the quilt-as-you-go method with the College Fjord quilt and will be adding the buttons as additional “quilting,” I haven’t really needed to think about quilting that will be added later. The quilting on the College Fjord quilt is largely invisible. But using this color arrangement for the Hus Ved Havet quilt will give me an opportunity to do some surface quilting to add some visual interest where perhaps the colors don’t provide it naturally. It’ll be interesting to see how that plays out as I continue to build the quilt.

I still like the color choices, and I still like the way they blend together. I’m reserving some judgment for when I get the sky fabric cut up and added to the image – that will change things, I’m sure. There are a lot of decisions that will have to be made there, so I’m trying not to get too excited about this yet. But I’m happy with what I see so far!

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And the Quilting Begins

I finished up the vertical strips yesterday and started the quilt-as-you-go method of sewing them together today. It’s slow going. As I’ve always said, my ability to match seams in bargello quilts is quite frankly abysmal, so nothing lines up properly. You’d think that because I strip-pieced the sky, all of those seams would at least line up, but noooo. I literally don’t know how to make these things any better than what I’ve done. And I have little patience or motivation to go back and fix anything. Fortunately, the results look good from a distance, and I’m not looking to enter any fancy shows where people will be getting up close and judging my work anytime soon.

I started in the middle of the quilt and started working towards the right side, so I was working with the bottom half of what was on the design wall. I got about three quarters of the way through that bottom half, plugging away in front of Christmas movies and football games, when I realized that the very dark sky blues that I’d used at the top and the bottom of the quilt…are not the same. I used one from the beginning, and then switched to a darker one later, and then I switched back. Completely unknowingly. I started assembling the quilt using the pieces of the darker of the two colors, which is in the middle vertical strips. And then I sewed a strip onto the quilt that had the lighter of the two blues, as I got closer to the right edge, and I noticed it then. See if you can tell the difference.

Yep.

So now what? My sense is that I’ve been looking at these strips for weeks, in lots of different light, and I’ve not noticed a thing. So…since there’s precedent of leaving two different colors in the same spot, I’m probably going to go in that direction. Replacing any of them at this point would be a LOT of work. If it’s not a glaring error, I’m going to run with it and hope that no one but me notices.

I’m really glad that, after my adventure running out of one blue for this quilt, I got extra fabric for the Hus Ved Havet quilt. Need a 1” strip? I’ll take a quarter of a yard, please!

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Now That Proof of Concept Exists, Part 2

The Hus Ved Havet image (see previous post) will be divided into five sections, each with its own coloring and bargello method: the land in the foreground (greens/yellow-greens), the water (gray-blues), the mountain (grays), the sky (a blue-to-yellow ombre I originally bought for the College Fjord quilt but that didn’t fit there), and the clouds (creams/very light grays). There are three trees/bushes that will also be included, and the house, which I will claim artistic license on and make red like so many houses in Lofoten (where this was shot), will be appliqued.

In my head, the fabrics here are still solid. We’ll see how that goes, but that is currently the plan. If they’re not solid, they’ll be fabrics that read solid, but right now, I’m on the hunt for more solids. Currently planning an outing next weekend to two stores I know have a ton of them.

The College Fjord quilt has been fairly simple to put together because of the mirror imaging. This is very different. I can strip piece this (like how most bargello quilts are constructed), but each color group is going to have to be pieced separately and then all sewn together.

Like the College Fjord quilt, I started with the basic contours of the image sketched on a large piece of paper as the image was projected onto it. The vertical strips have to be the same from top to bottom, which so far has not been too much of a challenge but may prove problematic as I keep going (I got through about ⅓ of it yesterday). This is a sneak peek of what the planning looks like so far:

For reference, this is the center-ish of the image from top to bottom near the left edge. On the right, you can see measurements (1”, 1.5”, etc.) in blocks. The line to the left of those measurements is the water line. Anything to the left of that line in this image is the mountain moving to sky, and anything to the right of the water line is, well, water going into land. Adding the vertical lines (which in this image run left to right) is a bit of a challenge. 

In the College Fjord quilt, I put vertical lines anywhere the contour of the mountain changed. But in this quilt, I also have to pay attention to the contour of the water against the land in the foreground, and if that changes, a vertical line needs to be added, too. Sometimes – in fact, surprisingly more often than not, they line up or at least can be fudged to line up. Other times they just don’t. It’s a lot to take into account, and I am 100% sure I will screw it up at some point. But so far, it’s working well.

One more design choice I made is that everything but the sky will be 1” strips; the sky will be 2” strips. This is exactly like the College Fjord quilt. I think it works really well that way – I like the contrast between the sky and the land. The one thing I haven’t decided yet is whether the clouds will be 1” or 2” strips. One inch might give me more flexibility, but two inches will blend better with the rest of the sky. I might have to do some experimenting before deciding that piece.

Still lots more to go on this quilt, but I’m really excited to see where this one goes. Let’s just hope I don’t need to create a spreadsheet this time!

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Now That Proof of Concept Exists, Part 1

When I originally decided to attempt an image using a bargello concept, I had two images in mind that I wanted this to work with. One was obviously the College Fjord quilt, which is on pause briefly until I have the right color again but is clearly going to be a gorgeous quilt in the end. I’m SO excited about that quilt!

But as I was planning the College Fjord quilt, there was some trepidation that it wouldn’t work for that one, and if it didn’t work there, I wasn’t going to even attempt a second one. Bargello quilts are just too detailed and difficult to put a lot of work into if it’s not going to be successful. So I said early on that I was going to attempt the College Fjord one, and if that worked, I’d attempt a second one.

Now that I have proof of concept, it’s time to start work on the second bargello. I am also really excited about this one, and now that I’ve looked at it a little bit, I’m REALLY glad I started with the College Fjord one. The College Fjord quilt is symmetrical – it’s a mirror image. The second one is not, which means it has its own special issues. Here’s the original image:

This image reminds me of a song, “Hus Ved Havet” (House by the Sea) by Halvdan Sivertsen, one of my favorite Norwegian musical artists. I have an early songbook of his that includes many images to go along with the music, and this image reminds me of the pencil drawing that is in that songbook to accompany this song. I’ve always wanted to do my own rendition of that idea – a house by the sea. So here we go.

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And It Comes to a Screeching Halt

That fabric that I substituted in – yeah, I didn’t have enough of that. I don’t have enough of that. So I have gotten this far, which you’ll notice isn’t a heck of a lot further than last time I posted.

And so the hunt begins. I know little about the fabric other than that it came from a jelly roll of Kona solids, so I am off to see the wizard to find Kona solids, hoping that when I do find them, this particular color will be among them. I need one 2” strip. If all else fails, I do have the information about the jelly roll and can buy another one of those, but I’m hoping to avoid doing that ‘cause, well, I really only need that one 2” strip. I have plenty of the other fabrics I’m using.

This, my friends, is where the fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants nature of my quilting habits bites me in the ass. I really need to learn to write stuff down.

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Halfway Done

In between loads of laundry today, I was able to get to the halfway point of the College Fjord quilt. And now I’m at a bit of a standstill.

Some notes on what has changed since the last picture:

  • I switched out one of the blues. In this image, in the seventh column from the left, it’s the light sky blue just above the darker mountain blue. The color that was originally there was a slightly lighter sky blue – that color is now the next sky blue down. It was a pain in the ass to switch it out, but I like this one much better.
  • I decided that it didn’t make a difference that some of the lightest sky blues are nearly indistinguishable from the lightest mountain blues. There is definitely a difference if you look closely, but when you look at the overall image, they sort of blend together. And you know, what? The mountains in the original image sort of blend into the sky, too. So I’m not going to sweat it.
  • The columns starting with KK (you can see the Post-It notes with the column label at the top), going to the right, were done with a slightly different, much faster process than the ones before them. And interestingly enough, they are getting to be more consistent in size, so there are fewer seams that don’t line up, at least right now. It will be interesting to see if that holds when I begin sewing the columns together.

This is 29 columns. There are 54 total, so I’ve completed just over half of them. Top to bottom is 32”; that is the finished size (unless I decide to remain true to the image and cut 2” off of the bottom). The finished quilt will be 54” wide – currently, this is just under 40” wide with the columns laid out side-to-side like this. Each of these columns will lose half an inch when sewn together – seam allowances are a thing, after all. The narrowest columns are currently 1”. So when you’re looking at this image, keep in mind that when these 29 columns are sewn together, the piece will be 14” narrower than it is now.

Once I got to this point, I stared at it on my design wall for a long time. I had actually started running out of space on the design wall and had to move it up to the top so that I can fit the remaining part of the image below it.

I’m still debating how I’m going to build this quilt. Is it going to be a quilt-as-you-go kind of thing, or should I build the entire top and then attempt to quilt it? I briefly debated starting to sew the columns together today, which I cannot do if I want to quilt-as-I-go. I’m having trouble imagining the columns squished together, so I debated trying it out to see what it would look like. I’m desperately suppressing the urge to sew the columns together. I want to see what it’s going to look like in the end! But until I figure out how I want to build it, and especially quilt it, I don’t want to take any steps that would require even more use of the seam ripper.

Part of my hesitation is that I’m still making design decisions. I switched out a whole color and replaced it with a new one – TODAY. I’m still not sure if I’m happy with those white blocks on what is now the right side (will be the middle eventually). I can’t even start to quilt-as-I-go if there’s any chance that I might want to change things up later. And I can’t guarantee that I won’t change anything. I’m just not at that point.

I’m also still debating snow. Part of me likes it the way it is. Part of me want to put in snow. But if I do put in snow – do I follow the contours of the image? Or do I put snow in squared-off lines? The latter would be awful, but the former might ruin the bargello format (which arguably is holding on by a thread anyway).

Still planning on a water line. Still hanging on to mother-of-pearl buttons for the clouds. Need to find a pale yellow or two for the sun at some point. But things are moving along.

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It’s 9:30pm…

…do you know where your seam ripper is? I do. My seam ripper and I are by now rather good friends. Math has never been a strong skill of mine. Add in seam allowances, and whoo boy. We’re all in for a rocky ride.

I’m beginning to remember why I said I’d never do another bargello quilt after the last (and only) one I did. Check that – I’ve always remembered why. I just also live with that unbridled optimism that says, “That was YEARS ago! Maybe you’ll be better at it this time!” If I could roll my eyes at my former self, I would.

Having said that, I am too far into the College Fjord quilt to give up on it now. And I really do like it – from a distance, as long as I don’t look too closely at the seams that don’t look like they’ll match up when they’re sewn together. Here it is, in its current state:

It really does resemble the photo! And I do think I’ll be able to use some of the wonkiness of the seams, especially those in the sky blues below the water line. I’ve always known – based on that bargello I did years ago – that there would be seams that didn’t line up. My plan right now is to make the ones above the water line align as much as I possibly can, but to let them be wonky below the water line.

Here’s why: reflections, even in mirror-like water, are never truly a mirror. If you look at the original image, there are bits of ice in the water, and there are lines where some breath of wind slid across that bit of surface, causing a tiny ripple. I was trying to figure out how to get that across in the quilt. Wonky seams actually create that illusion nicely, much to my surprise!

I’m getting to the center part of the quilt, where I might have to fudge a sky blue or two here and there, so we’ll see how that goes. The blues I have are just enough, and so far, I have gotten away with not using one of the very lightest sky blues I have. I’m hoping not to use it at all – I think it’s too close to the one next to it – but I suspect I might have to pull it out in a couple of places. But that is a project for another day…maybe over the upcoming holiday weekend?

At this point in time, I think I have enough of a proof of concept that the bargello construction works for this kind of image, so I may begin to source fabrics for the “Hus Ved Havet” quilt. More on that to come!

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I Might Be Onto Something

I think I got this!

Over this past weekend, I had a full day to spend in the sewing room, so I started out working on a very overdue gift, but then had some time left over. I started sewing more of the double-wide strips, and I took out some of the lighter sky blues and replaced them with darker sky blues. Again, mistakes were made, decisions were reversed, math was done incorrectly, and the seam ripper got a workout.

After sewing four more of the double-wide strips, I decided I needed to see how they looked cut in half and mirrored. Ignoring the fact that there are regularly things that don’t line up (‘cause I’m me), I’m actually really pleased with how this looks so far.

I feel like it’s actually starting to look like some mountains with a beautifully clear sky above, reflected in some very clear water. Which, frankly, is what the original picture is. There’s a lot more to the picture, though.

While I am happy that it’s starting to look like it’s supposed to, there are still some things that need to get resolved:

  • The current plan is to do quilt-as-you-go quilting on this, with the strips being sewn together at the same time that they’re being sewn to the batting and backing. But I may have to throw that out, depending on what my solutions to these other issues are.
  • What, exactly, will I do for a water line? I was going to completely ignore it, but the more I look at this, the more I think that it needs to be there. There is, in fact, a clear water line in the original image. SO…white or blue? How will it be created? (Current thinking on that is embroidery floss, but I’m still contemplating.)
  • Same thoughts, only for snow. There is snow on top of almost all of the mountains. I would like to add that in somehow. The jury is completely out on that one…no idea how that’s going to go off, especially with the quilt-as-you-go method.
  • Look closely at the rightmost two strips in the picture. The lightest mountain blue – which is the second-lightest of all of the mountain blues – almost disappears against the sky blues. If my solution for the snow does not solve that issue, I’m going to have to figure out how to set those off so that the lightest mountains don’t just blend into the lightest sky colors. Although…if you look at the original image, the furthest mountains do just sort of blend into the sky. Again, not quite sure what I’m going to do about that.

I have some work ahead of me – design choices as well as a LOT of sewing. I did cut and sort the remaining mountain blue pieces – I have 45 little piles of mountain blue strips pinned and labeled with the column letter, ready to go. I may try to get some of them sewn tonight, in fact.

I’ve completed nine of 54 strips. As my friend Joe said when I was telling him about it, “You’re almost 20% done!” Dude, that did not help.

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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.