Tag: Lofoten

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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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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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What’s the Process?

When I was going through the process of building the Horseshoe Canyon quilt, I wasn’t quite sure what form this blog would take. So I documented a few things, but not nearly enough to walk anyone through the process of doing it for themselves. Now that I’ve got one quilt under my belt (mostly anyway), I’m going to start working on several new ones. As I work on them, I’ll document the steps I take so that someone else might be able to follow in my footsteps someday. So…what’s next?

I have three images I’m working on. Let me go through them one by one.

The first image I’m working on is a picture I took in the Lofoten Islands in Norway in the fall of 2023. This is the classic Reine (Hamnøy, really) rorbuer shot that every photographer wants to get. I got it home, and I removed all of the color in it except for the red of the fishermen’s cottages, which is classic Lofoten style. Then, I had it printed out on fabric. The idea, once I gather the gumption to tackle it, is that I will replace some of the color from the original image using thread. I’ve never done this before. I’m a little scared. This will take me a while to begin – I guarantee it.

This image is also printed out on fabric. I took this on a recent cruise in Alaska – Tracy Arm, in Tongass National Forest, to be specific. The icebergs in Tracy Arm, which come off of the South Sawyer Glacier, are sometimes this lovely shade of green-blue that I found rather impossible to resist as a photographer. I had the whole photograph printed out on fabric, but in reality I’m just going to use the iceberg part of the image. The rest of it I will recreate using regular fabrics I can find in the quilt store. This one I am really, truly excited about.

This is another one I’m excited about. This picture was taken by Oscar Farrera, the official ship photographer on the Alaska cruise I went on. I saw this picture on a screen on the ship and asked Oscar if I could use it as the inspiration for a quilt, and he agreed (although I’m pretty sure he thinks I’m nuts). This one is going to be more abstract – there’s no way I could do a faithful rendition of this using fabrics from the quilt store, so while I will indeed be using other fabrics, the idea is that I’ll use the colors and the shapes in the original image to inspire the end result. Unlike the Horseshoe Canyon quilt, though, I do not (yet?) have a pattern I’ll be following. In fact, I’m still not 100% sure how I plan to do any of this, but there’s nothing like figuring it out as I go along!

At this point, you – like Oscar – may be questioning my sanity. “Three pictures?” you ask. “Why three?” Excellent question. There are several reasons. 

  1. It’s going to take me some time to figure out the thread painting bit of the Lofoten quilt, so in the short term, I’ll really only be working on two quilts. But I do suspect I will start work on the Lofoten quilt before I finish at least one of the other two.
  2. It’s also going to take me a few weeks to find a critical mass of fabrics for the abstract iceberg quilt. I have several fabric stores I want to visit, and while a couple of them are in the area, a couple aren’t, and they are, unfortunately, in totally opposite directions from my house. In addition, most of the stores are open during my working hours on weekdays, so I have to go on weekends. It’ll probably take me a month or so to get to all of them. While I’m gathering fabrics, I’ll probably attempt to work out what exactly I’ll do to them once I find them, so there will be some planning behind the scenes that may or may not be documented.
  3. ADHD. I get bored easily. I found that while I was working on the Horseshoe Canyon quilt, I needed a distraction from it because I was really sick of sewing all of those orange strips together. Fortunately, I took a three-week break from working on that quilt right in the middle because I went on vacation, so I was able to take the time I needed and come back to it excited to work on it and, most of all, get it done. I do not have any vacations planned anytime soon, so I’m going to plan now to work on several things so I don’t get bored or frustrated and attempt to walk away from any of these projects permanently. When I’ve had enough of working on this one, I can work on this other one.

So, for those reasons, I’ve got three projects moving along at a slow but steady pace.