Gray/Blue Bargello!

Here’s another top I made recently. This one is another one that resulted from my contact as a result of the “Zero Waste” group we have which is a local Facebook group.

The lady who gave me the original gray shirts which I called Random Act 1 has been giving me shirts quite regularly (every 2-3 weeks). After I gave her the quilt that I made her - she told me she lets her baby son lie on it on the floor. I found another quilt in my house appropriate for a girl and gave that one to her. I went back to her house several times and she gave me more shirts - a good number of them I took apart on our trip to southern Poland a few weeks ago now.

But I told her that I would make her a quilt - using those shirts-if we could get them in the colors she liked.

From one direction

She told me she loves gray - and we talked about the bargello quilt I made for my friend Luanne. It goes together very quickly (considering it’s a big quilt) - and I thought it would be a great chance to show her what we can do with upcycleds. The other thing that works well for it is that one only needs 7 strips which I seem to be able to make from the average shirt that I get. Some, the larger ones, I can get more than that, but even a short sleeved shirt gives me 7 strips, it appears. If it has darts, well, then that’s a bit harder, of course.

Here’s from the other angle. I did add two rows, so that this is the angle that I designed it to go on the bed. I like how it looks like it has a hump in the middle but it doesn’t - it is lying very flat on the floor!

With an upcycled quilt in this pattern - probably over half the work is done by the time you get the strip sets together.

I had the hardest time deciding on colors and gradation. At first Agata told me she wanted gray. (Not sure what it is about people here - but gray and beige/brown seem all the rage - where’s the COLOR?).

I told her that the pattern calls for a second color so she chose navy. I had thought to put in black along with the gray, but when she went with navy, I took out the black and just left the darkest gray, still gray. I didn’t want it to look like I had tried to match but didn’t succeed which can easily happen with navy/black.

Some of the leftover strips. I will probably choose from among these for the binding.

In the end, yes, I am totally taken with how classy the top looks in spite of the fact that it is all upcycleds.

I did use a couple of things I already had in my upcycleds shelves to help with the gradation and since I’ve gotten shirts from probably 4 or 5 sources lately, I didn’t try to separate them out.

I haven’t decided on what to do for the backing of this one yet. I think it would be fun to use upcycleds - esp. upcycled shirts. I’m thinking of cutting things into 10” squares or using even bigger pieces and making a backing from all upcycleds as well…only piece it - but not small pieces.

As I was working on this top for Agata, I wanted to show her how it was going, so I took a lot of pictures as I constructed the top - over a period of two days this time.

Here’s another close up of the fabrics. You can tell they are shirts, but I think the overall effect is great.

I really do like it.

The whole quilt top was made from a series of 7 strip sets that look like this: You can see that the colors gradate from light to dark (sort of) with the blue and then the gray. It’s not perfect, but I’ve learned to embrace the imperfection with the bargellos. I think it looks fine in the top shown above. A couple of the grays could have been placed better - but it hard when working with plaids and other fabrics with prints, and such.

This is the sheet of paper I taped all my samples to in order to keep track of the fabrics.

The pattern is the same one I’ve used before called Surf Song out of a book by Eileen Wright. You can get it here from Amazon. (The link is an affiliate link meaning we get a tiny bit of money from it. If you buy it from this link - no extra charge to you!)

With an upcycled materials quilt top like this - by the time you get to putting the top together, probably over half the work is done since it takes a while to find the right colors, cut the shirts/other things apart, cut the strips and sew them together in long pieces to make 44” strips. Whew. By the time I started on the quilt top itself, it was great fun!

And there you go…just another thing I’ve been doing this month!

Be sure to check out what my sis has for you in the store!

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