Tag Archives: bargello

Rest Quilt

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My front door is not completely airtight. I tried getting some foam strips to put inside the doorframe, but then I couldn’t close the door. I thought about, and started, a crochet tube that I could hang on the hinges to block the most air from getting in…

But in the end, I decided a quilt that could cover most of the frame/door gap would be the most effective, most fun, and most aesthetically pleasing. I had a jelly roll from Moda Fabrics and decided to do a bargello-ish quilt. I wanted to depict a quarter rest, since I am a musician and I want my home to be a place of rest. A place between all the noise and chaos and effort-giving to rest, restore, relax.

I sketched out the shape on graph paper and determined the widths of the strip sets. I used two “leading edges”, one for the left side of the rest (white) and one for the left side of the background that bounds the rest (dark flowers). I used lighter and less busy prints for inside the rest, and the darker and busy prints for the background.

The blue and purple edges are the rest, so the top edge in the picture is the left edge of the rest, and the gray blocks below the bottom edge are the background strips
Rest fabric in the middle, with the busy background fabrics to both sides

As with a normal bargello, I assembled the strip sets and then cut them to the corresponding widths. The jelly roll didn’t have duplicates of all the fabrics, so I alternated the ones that didn’t have exact matches. Then I pressed the seams to alternate, and sewed the strip sets back together.

After some consideration, especially using a black and white filter on my camera, I decided the edges of the rest needed a tiny border to really make it stand out. I attached a strip of dark green as if it was bias tape, sealing the raw edges of the strip sets inside. Then I appliqued the background onto the right side of the rest, ripped off the unneeded background, and appliqued the rest into the extra background.

Pinned and ready to be appliqued – I used dark green thread and went right over the dark green strips
You can see the excess strips from the “rest” bargello portion sticking out on the right side

So that was the rest part, the middle part, done. I still needed two sides to make the quilt large enough. I cut a bunch of 2.5″ strips out of scraps and did a “jelly roll race” type of construction to make a big panel of stripes. Seeing as this area was meant to be busy and chaotic, I cut the panel and re-sewed it together on an angle a couple times. Then I split the panel in two for the two sides, and sewed them onto the middle rest panel.

Then it was time to quilt! I did my most confident free motion motifs: loops, “toothpaste”, and abstract geometric, and switched thread throughout. I liked just doing some freeform, unstructured quilting and filling the space with whatever I wanted. For the rest, I did free motion stitch in the ditch because I needed to change angles often and didn’t want to deal with moving the whole quilt 90 degrees every few inches.

I had to do two nerve wracking cutouts – one for the door handle and chain, and another for the peephole. I measured multiple times and then bravely cut once. 🙂

Peephole cutout 🙂 so strange to take the scissors to a finished quilt
Hand sewing the binding to the back with the friendly helper

To affix the quilt to the door, I made a little frame out of wooden yardsticks (my quilt hanging devices of choice) and screwed it into the door. I used fabric loops to hang the quilt on the frame. And thus, it was done, ready for the tail end of this winter and many winters to come.

Project completed March 2025.

Rainbow Bargello Quilt

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My second quilt! I loved making this quilt. It’s a kit from Bluprint that came with everything I needed to make the quilt top (and I bought yardage of one of the fabrics for the backing, and some 80% cotton/20% polyester batting). A bargello is a type of quilt that’s made using strip sets. This bargello needed 3 jelly rolls (6 strips of each of the 20 colors) and that made the entire 76″x92″ (technically a twin but fits on my queen bed) quilt top and I had some left over for a pillow.

The pattern tells you the order of the strip set, and in this bargello there’s only one set that you make 5 times (the 6th strip was cut up into baby rectangles to make a small portion of the quilt). Other bargellos can be made with more than one strip set to make ribbons that play together. So you sew all those strips together for five big striped rectangles. Then you cut your rectangles into strips of varying widths, each with all 20 colors in order.

  • It would be prudent to explain now that some people sew their rectangles into tubes, so the 1st color and 20th color are sewn together. While efficient (see next paragraph), this method didn’t work for me because my strip sets didn’t turn into perfect rectangles and were, in fact, wonky. Very wonky. Like not even close to parallel sides wonky. But! It still worked, I just didn’t sew my rectangles into tubes.
  • Also, this video about putting bargellos together may be easier to understand than the paragraph you’re about to read. 😉

Okay, so now you have your long strips and the colors are all in the same order. And you know that the 3″ strip goes first, then a 2″ strip, etc. etc. So let’s say the order of the strips is A, B, C, D (to you know, the width of your quilt or section) and the order of the colors is 1, 2, 3 (to 20). Strip A stays with the top color as 1 and the last color as 20. For Strip B, you cut the seam between fabrics 1 and 2, remove fabric 1, and add fabric 1 to the bottom – so your strip goes 2 to 20 and then 1. For Strip C, you seam rip between 2 and 3, and add the top to the bottom – and your strip goes 3 to 20, then 1, then 2. On an on until you get to Strip T (the 20th strip) that goes 20, then 1 to 19.

  • Strips in order per the pattern – 1 is at the bottom, 20 is the dark gray at the top
  • Partially constructed block – excuse the furry helper

Then you sew your strips together, and it makes the wonderful bargello effect. The key to making it look wavy is to have the strips be different widths – otherwise it would just be diagonal lines like a checkerboard. I really want to design my own bargello (perhaps on a smaller scale) to look like a river or something, with overlapping waves and stuff.

  • The two blocks at the bottom were made out of individual baby rectangles, the rest is strip sets
  • All pinned up in my family/dining room!
Approximately 400 safety pins later…. (a Kwik Klip helps close all the pins)

Then I basted and quilted it with my little “toothpaste” designs! Doesn’t it look like little squeezes of toothpaste? 🙂 I wanted a design that was flowy like the bargello itself, but possible to do in an all-over fashion. After doing the “custom” quilting on the Green Diamond Quilt, I wanted to see what would happen if I did the same thing on the entire quilt – and save myself some brain energy. I couldn’t decide what color thread to use, so I opted for variegated rainbow pastel thread that blends in pretty well to both the quilt top and the backing. Plus it’s another level of colorfulness that is fun.

Some free motion in real-time! Remember that the fabric is moving, not the needle 🙂

The toothpaste design is done in columns, so I started in the true middle, and worked up and down as I moved to the right (which gradually decreases how much sandwich is in the throat of your machine – between the needle and the case), then flipped it around and did the exact same thing to the other side. Since I’d practiced a lot on pen and paper and with scraps – more practice than last time! – the quilting came together pretty easily. Plus, each intersection is only 4 pieces of fabric coming together instead of 8, so it was significantly less bumpy than the Green Diamond Quilt.

But still, this quilt was a beast to wrangle with my machine. It has decent throat space but a bunch of cotton is heavy, and the quilt would fall into my lap as I moved up, which made it harder to control since I was working against gravity. I was only able to drape so much on myself before it would fall down, but I have a big enough table that the quilt could sit on the table in the other directions. I understood immediately why those set-in sewing machine tables are super popular, and why a longarm would change the game completely. But I’m not there yet – I still have many smaller scale projects I’m excited to work on, and twin-ish/queen-ish size quilts are still possible for me.

  • Glamour shot outside before washing – look at the cool shadows!
  • On my bed after washing

That said, I got the quilting done in three nights and am super pleased with the results. After washing my Green Diamond Quilt, I knew it would only look better after washing, and it does. 🙂 It’s crinkly and soft and puffy in all the right ways. Plus because it’s cotton, it feels cool to the touch. I have it on my bed right now, but because it’s primarily thin cotton batting, there isn’t as much warmth as I’d like – I’m naturally a 3 blanket person. So I bought this “dream puff” polyester batting for my next bed quilt that claims it’s twice as warm as down, so we’ll see 🙂

Project completed May 31, 2019.