Bargello Quilt Pattern Table Runner

I absolutely love bargellos. They have an amazing energy and sense of movement. What I don't like about them is having to match up all those seams, and so I don't do it. I refuse to do it. So I've come up with a way that I don't have to match up those seams. I also love table runners. They're a quick, easy thing to do. I like to change them out on my table all the time, I like to actually use them. I wanna have enough that I can throw it in the washer and dryer, and they make great little gifts, so it's nice to be able to do that, too. This one was made out of solids, Kona solids with white, and when I quilted it, I decided, or when I pieced it, I decided to throw this black line in there to add some oomph, and then I repeated that black line on the outside edges, stitched really simply with a stipple in the background of the white, and then it will have a narrow black binding that will kind of, you know, finish it off when it's all done. When we look at this structure of the bargello, this is the pieced unit across here. You can actually see this pieced line that goes all the way across, and so what we've done is sewn a strip set. Now, I used one and a half inch cut strips by the 22 inch length of a fat quarter. For this table runner, i needed three strip sets. So that's all the math you need to know, these were cut one and a half inches, there are 10 of them. The only one that was different was the black. It was cut only an inch so that it finished quite a bit smaller. The white that I'm going to sew on was also 22 inches long, and it was six and a half inches wide, and it's what makes the outside edge of this. After I had the bargello units sewn together, I added a border just on the two ends. So you can make this whatever size you want, just make all of your units the same width and length before you sew them together. The black one should be a different, a different width, something narrower, and 10 fabrics. This happens to look really, really cool if you sew it together in multiple units with a black strip in between. You can make a bed-sized quilt, you can make a baby quilt, you can make all sorts of things using this exact same structure if you will. So I said strip sets. It has three strip sets, and if you don't know what a strip set is, it's exactly what it sounds like. It's strips that are sewn together into a set. You want to, you know, think about how you care about, you know, your neatness or whatever. I don't really care, but I'm striving for about a quarter inch seam allowance. It's yours. Nothing really has to fit into each other, so no perfection is needed. So I'm just gonna finish off this strip set real quick. Sew on the last two fabrics, and then I'm going to press it, 'cause the pressing is kind of key with a bargello. I don't even bother to cut them the exact 22. You can if you want to. I kind of get lazy. If you have fabrics that are the full length of the fabric, you can leave it as a 44, but I find it much easier to work with when it's a 22. I never pin these strips. You can if you want to. Frankly, I'd rather just adjust as I go. Okay, so now we're ready to press this, and any time you're doing, pressing a strip set, you want to try as hard as you can, even for this kind of funky seams don't have to match bargello, to make sure that you don't distort that strip set, because you'll pay for it later. Things won't, things won't go together the way we want them to. And one of the best ways to ensure that not happening is to make your seams stand up. So hopefully you can see that. When I pull on this ever so slightly, those seams stand up. So I put my iron down on my first strip, pull so I make these, at least these first few stand up, and then I carefully press them to one side, make them stand up, and press them to one side. Now, I'm going to make the ironing do the bulk of any fixing of this becoming distorted before I go and cut anything. So now I'm gonna do it again, make them stand up, and what happens is is pretty much every place where I've stopped my pressing and started it again, I end up with an area that's either thicker or thinner, and I go back in and fix that before I cut into it. Now, some people will grab a ruler at this point and use their ruler to check the width of their piece, but generally speaking, you can look at it visually on your cutting mat and get a feel for its straightness or lack thereof. And so I can see that there's some distortion here, and if I want it to be a little bit more equal, I can pull things, and so I'm just kind of pulling to release them into their, a better, a straighter, whatever. And then I'm going to iron again, and this time, if I have steam, use steam, as much steam as I feel comfortable using, and then I'll iron from the front. Now, the reason I don't put my white on yet is because it's so big and heavy and thick and wide, I should say, that it's makes it a little harder to iron. It's unwieldy that then. If I were sewing another 40 strips on here, I would iron these in small strips like this, and then join them together and iron just that seam. Okay, that's good enough for me. There's probably some little wobbles here and there, but because I'm not matching up any seams, it's not gonna matter as much. So now I'm gonna sew on my white fabric that makes my background. Again, I've cut it six and a half inches. Now, this is a sample piece that I'm sewing together to show you because my table runner's already finished. If I were sewing this at home, I would be using gray thread. I just happened to have this black thread in my machine, so no, I wouldn't sew white with black, I would sew white with gray if it was with these bright color. Now, here's the trick to bargello. My strip set gets sewn into a tube, so now I'm gonna sew this white to the other side also. And my tube is sewn. So my strip set has its background sewn on it, and I've turned it into a tube, okay. So now we're gonna cut it apart into sub units, and because I am building whatever it is I'm building and I don't care that anything has to match up and I don't have a predetermined pattern or any of those things, all I really care about is that my seams are somewhat straight so that my pieces end up being long strips that are cut straight and not at an angle. So as long as I match up a seam allowance, I can get started with cutting, and I've got this itty-bitty ruler. I would use a bigger one, but this one's gonna work, too. And I'm going to cut various widths. What I'm not gonna cut is anything smaller than an inch, because I'm gonna lose a quarter inch and a quarter inch on each side for seam allowance, and so I don't wanna deal with anything tinier than that, but I don't even really go that tiny, 'cause it doesn't really need to be that tiny. I'm just gonna do, and I don't even care what it's measurement is, really. I just wanna cut. And I'm just gonna do a few of these here 'til I have a nice variety. And there we go. At this point, I'm gonna flip these over so I can see my white, because the white is going to tell me something interesting. The white is where I'm going to cut these apart. Let me grab my scissors real quick. And I'm gonna use my ruler again, and I'm gonna keep these in the order that they are cut in if I want to, or I can change 'em. But if I'm gonna change them, I need to line them up, because I'm going to cut these apart on lines that don't exist at this point, but I'm gonna make those lines. I'm gonna make my first line about an inch down from my seam and just draw it. The next one, I'm gonna continue to move downward. At any point that I want to, I can change my direction. Here I'm gonna go downward again, and now this next one, I'm gonna move back up, but I'm not gonna move up to the same exact as before, I'm gonna make it some place different, let's say right there. So this line, this line, this line, this line tells me that my bargello's gonna move down and then it's gonna start to move up again. So I'm simply gonna cut apart at those lines, and I can cut anywhere on the white that I want to, moving, undulating down and up and down and up. There's no one right way to do it. You can do it three or four at a time, sew those together, see what it looks like, and then determine where you wanna go next, or you can pre-cut them all. There we go. So as I open these up, I can actually get a feel for what this is gonna look like moving downward, and then it starts to move back up again. So I'm gonna go ahead and sew these together real quickly, you can get an actual look of how this works. I don't have to match up anything except the top and the bottom, which is just fabulousness, 'cause I hate matching seams. I don't have to pin anything, I'm simply gonna start sewing, and once I've gotten a little ways down, I will grab the end to make sure the two ends match up. So I'll match up these ends. There's so much elasticity in there because of all those seams that it's very easy to make them match. Pick up the next one, match up the top. Match up that bottom. And so on. So you're gonna just keep sewing these together until you have the length that you can yield from the amount of units that you cut, and then press. You're just press all the seams in one direction, and you're gonna do it just like you did before by making those seams stand up. So you pull those until those seem stand up, pull again until they stand up. Now, this is really bulky, so the pressing is a little harder to do, but it's part of the work of creating a bargello is that pressing, and soon you'll get to see the front. Make sure you keep those seam allowances going the way they're supposed to, then we're gonna turn it over and press it from the front also, make sure we haven't got any fullness in any of those seams. So again, remember, you can cut your strips any width you want. I wouldn't get too wide, I wouldn't go any wider than three inches, 'cause then it's a very bulky bargello. I really love the one and a half inches, but some people might think that's a little too narrow, and here we go, our bargello, and you can see it right there, so that's our bargello. When I'm all done and everything's sewn together, there's generally some unevenness on both sides, so I just true up the two edges, layer it together with my backing and batting and stitch away. So remember bargellos are made from strip sets. This one had three that were cut one and a half inches by the 22 inch fat quarter length. I threw a narrow one in in the black, and I had a total of 10 of those colors. My background strip was cut six and a half inches so that I had about three inches on both sides that are possible in my undulation here, and it's just so fun and so easy and no matching up of any seams. Give it a try.