No-Plan-Bargello

I've been intrigued by bargello quilts for a while and always wanted to do one. Well, Rebekah of Don't Call Me Becky (and I always think out the "dot com" as well ;) showed a really neat one she saw at a quilt show. However, my 3D-thinking ability is not sufficient to figure out how that quilt was done with the traditional bargello method.


I don't do well with patterns (or recipes), and having read and been told how the bargello works in general, I just picked some fabrics (15 or so), cut 2.5" strips, sewed them together and joined the circle.


I also felt rebellious when I made this quilt, so I decided to join all the strips by sewing in the same direction - GASP! - not up down up down! I wanted to see if it's really as bad "as they say". It was certainly easier to match up all the selvedges...

I then started playing around with layout, but after I got this far (below), I just cut different width strips and decided if I wanted the wave to go up or down afterwards.


After very careful plan-less designing, I ended up with this: a gap! Argh, how did that happen?? I looked far and wide for the missing strip, but in the end I chalked the gap up to my being human (i.e. making errors) and fixed it but slicing a 1.25" strip off the wide one you say adjacent to the gap - that way I had an extra strip to complete the step.

Here it is, I'm quite happy with it! Again, not sure what I'll do with this. Maybe a baby quilt!


What about you, have you made a bargello before? Did you use a pattern?