Bargello Update - ALMOST There!!

I finally have ALL of the 37 zillion strips of the Twisted Bargello wall hanging sewn, and the seams pressed in the proper direction.

The progression of colors and the twisting of the pattern make it very easy to sew in a mistake now and again.  I had places where a few strips were upside down, and a few places where I put in a whole set of four pieces when I should have used only a partial set.

Oh, I should explain that!  When we took the class for this quilt at the February retreat my family group attended, the teacher had modified the pattern we were using.  We had 20 fabrics in all, cut into strips.  We made a series of five strip sets of four fabrics each, rather than sew all 20 strips into one big piece.  It made sub-cutting easier and more accurate for one thing.  And for another, it made less 'un-cutting' when you had to separate the set to achieve the twist in the pattern. 

   It worked really well, if you were paying attention, and super well if you weren't!  So say you had to use the strip we were calling 1234 and attach it to the strip 16-15-14-13, you didn't have to dismantle a whole big strip and then discard the center.  And I think we actually did fewer sub cuts, because we only cut the sections we needed, not a whole 20 fabric strip.

So here we are, pinned up on my design wall.  The pieces of white and yellow at the top are paper scraps with the row number written on them.  It helped immeasurable to keep those pinned to the strip.


Not pinned at the bottom, which is why they're flying free... that's on a set of closet doors.

 You can see where I've sewn a couple of the strips together into sets by where they don't separate at the bottom.  That piece of yellow paper is a note one of the grands taped up -- I forgot to move it for the picture!

I have folding doors, two sets, on the storage closet in my sewing room.  For a design wall, I took pieces of quarter inch foam core board, covered them with flannel, and tacked them to the doors.  I used 24x36 inch pieces, which are bigger then the doors.  The ones that swing out can hang over the edge of the door, but on the ones that fold in, I had to cut the board into pieces, and leave a small gap for the fold area.  I only placed them above the handles.  Primitive but it works.

It shows better in this picture.

And no, they're not even at the top.  That's because I'm using recycled foam core board, from presentation boards that were discarded by the engineers at work.  I peeled off the maps or charts or whatever.  I figured since I was covering them it didn't matter.

And the price was right!!

Keep on sewing.