Bargello Attempt No. 1

At the quilt fair my friends and I attended last weekend, I bought a beautiful swath of ombre batik fabric.  It was near-white on one end and shaded into dark, dark teal on the other end.  "What to do with such a gorgeous piece of fabric?", I thought to myself.   Then I remembered one of my first posts on this blog: bargellos.

Ombre fabric.  Mine was similar to the bottom half, but sadly, I
forgot to take a picture before I hacked it into 190 pieces.

My dear sister-in-law, Jody, introduced me to this technique, if you'll remember, and it was love at first sight.  In traditional bargellos, many different fabrics are combined to create an overall pattern.  I thought, "Hey! I already had a bunch of different colors in the same print in one piece of fabric, so why don't I just cut it into small squares and sew them back together again?"

So that's what I did.  190 2" squares to be exact.  Thankfully, the inspiration and consequent action took place after the toddlers went to bed, so I didn't end up playing Momma's 190 Pick-Up.  After cutting my squares, I rearranged them into my faux-bargello pattern and sewed them together into a little something like this:

Approx. 27" x 14"

A little bit better detail.

Some of the marbling and color detail.

So let's recap.  1 piece of fabric--190 squares--less than an 2 hours of sewing--the coolest looking quilt I've ever made!   I highly recommend this process!  (Oh, and if you happen to get one of these as a gift at some point, I worked really, really hard on it! Wink, wink.)