Jelly Roll Bargello Retreat

SUPPLIES NEEDED:

• Sewing machine in good working order
• Basic Sewing Supplies including seam ripper and straight pins
• Medium Sized cutting mat/rotary cutter with new blade
• Large square ruler to square up your piece before adding borders.
• Stripology XL ruler
• Neutral thread
• Your own design wall (piece of fleece or batting about 45” wide or a flannel-backed tablecloth) with tape
• Wooden pressing stick for pressing seams open (required!)
• Fine tip sharpie

FABRIC REQUIREMENTS:

• 20 WOF strips cut 2.5” wide (I would recommend purchasing a jelly roll. It gives more options to work with a color flow, share with others in class, or you could potentially make two quilts with it.)
• ¼ yard: Inner Border or flange. This fabric needs to “stop” the motion of the bargello, so needs to be a solid or texture, not a print.
• ½ yard: Second Border (a bridge between borders)
• 1½ yard: Outer border (this is enough to also include binding) Not too busy, but can be a fabric from the same line of your jelly roll.
• ½ yard for different fabric binding (optional)
• 3 yards backing

PRE-CLASS HOMEWORK:
I have named this quilt a “Jelly Roll Bargello” because you will need to use twenty 2.5” wide strips. Often jelly rolls have up to 40 coordinated strips, and this could be shared with a friend, and saves time cutting from your stash. We will be concentrating on the center of the quilt, but making a flange and adding borders will be demonstrated.

Colors and values need to flow from one to another for the smoothest bargello. Play with your strips before class, and see if you can create this flow. Let’s say that you have a jelly roll that has browns and blues find a more solid blue and a more solid brown, place them about eight inches apart and fill that space with strips that change value and texture, and perhaps have some of both colors. You do not want to group all of your darks together or all of your lights together. Also, there must be enough of a change to be seen ten feet away. You do not want two fabrics that are almost the same to be right next to each other. In this project, that would read as one wide strip instead of two separate ones. One tip: the two ends must also flow together since you will eventually sew your strata into a loop. I would love to see your flow solutions before you sew your strata together.