I finished my Scrappy Bargello quilt top from the pattern at Quiltville. The directions make it sound like this will be a breeze to whip up. Maybe it is if you have a pre-cut bin of strips like she recommends. I didn’t. I had to cut all 128 different strips. Took forever. But I got smart and when I had enough fabric I cut several strips so now I have the start of a bin of strips for my next project.

Making this quilt was like taking a trip back through my quilting past. I not only needed 128 different fabric but I needed to be able to get a 2.5″ by 16″ strip from them. A lot of my fabrics don’t have that much. But I was determined not to buy anythng for this project. There is a huge variety of fabrics in this quilt. It has everything from high-end batiks to the ugliest fabrics I’ve ever seen. Some of the fabrics I swear I’ve never seen before in my life and I can’t imagine how they got in my fabric drawers. They must have been from fat quarter exchanges over the years. It was fun to be completely random and just grab from a drawer and cut anything that was big enough. Then I just pieced them together randomly.

bargello

It looks better in the picture than in real life. I think the farther away you are the more the colors blend and harmonize.

While I was cutting I was also cutting four 2.5″ squares of fabric and setting them aside for another project. Midway through making this quilt I forgot what the squares were for. I thought I was losing my mind. I was cleaning my desk off recently and found a sketch of the pattern I was going to make. I was so relieved that I wasn’t insane! That is going to be my next project. Another advantage to being on crutches is that it lengthens your attention span. If I make the commitment to going up and down the stairs then I’ll spend at least an hour sewing. When I could go up and down the stairs easily I would get distracted and sew a piece together and then go do something else. I may get more quilts done this way!