Motion: After the Storm

Since I had just a short time to work on my project before leaving on a trip, I wanted to find something I could do quickly. Often when I’m looking for ideas, I consult The Google. After typing “motion in quilts” into my search bar, I came up with “bargello.” Cool! I’d never made a bargello quilt before, and I didn’t even know how to get started. So I spent a little more time searching, and came up with an idea from Quilt Inspiration for a free bargello pillow pattern. 

I’ll admit to feeling a little guilty about using a pattern for this, but since I had limited time, and it was a technique completely new to me, I cut myself a break this time. Pawing through my stash, I came up with these fabrics.

The first step was to cut strips all the same width and then sew them together in order. Here’s how that looked.

Next, I was to sew the two ends together to form a tube.

Next, I was to cut strips perpendicular to what I had already. Those were cut in variable widths. To get the feeling of motion, the tubes were “unsewn” at different color changes until I had a pattern of strips that looked like this:

It made sense to sew the strips together using the quilt as you go method. I created a large-enough back and batting, and then sewed the quilt top together quilting each strip to the ones that came before.

Then, I squared it up, gave it a red binding, and my quilt was finished.

Here’s how it looks from the back.

And since you can’t have a rainbow without some stormy weather, I’m calling my quilt “After the Storm.” It ends up 20 x 20 inches.

I'm looking forward to see what the rest of you did with this prompt. I hope you like my quilt.