My Quilty Musings: Project Quilting 15.2

The theme for the second challenge of 2024 is Sky Color. But we can't use the typical sky color - blue! Well, we can use blue, but it has to be less than 10% of the colors in the project. This time of year, 'less than 10% blue' accurately describes the sky in my area most of the time! We actually get fewer sunny days here than they do in the Pacific Northwest, which is known for it's rain. I definitely don't want a gray, dreary project! So sunrise/sunset colors, or night sky colors seemed to be my options.

When I did my entry for the "Silhouette" challenge in 2022 (PQ 13.2), I used the colors of the sunrise. (Well, for me it was more like sunset, since I am hardly ever up in time to see the sunrise ^.^!) Even though I love those colors, I didn't want to repeat that color scheme in another project. Instead, I decided to do a night sky with northern lights.

The question was, of course, what to make, and how to incorporate those colors. When I was searching for images of the Northern lights, I discovered that the aurora are most commonly green, but there are variations depending on the intensity of the solar winds, the composition of the charged particles in the magnetosphere and the altitude at which the charged particles react with the atmosphere.

Image courtesy of space.com

What struck me in all the images was the flowing ribbons of greens, blues, violets and even reds and pinks! It reminded me of a bargello quilt, so that's what I decided to make.

I've never made a bargello quilt, so that lead to another bout of internet surfing. I found a few sites that had instructions, so I figured that it might be pretty easy to pull off a small one in a week.

I decided early on that I would only use fabrics in my stash for my PQ projects. I have a medium size bin of solids that was given to me, so I decided to use those. The only drawback was that I didn't have enough of the clear vivid colors that I've come to associate with the aurora borealis. I did have pastels, so that is what I used. I reasoned that maybe not all northern lights are vivid, but the vivid ones make the best photos, so that is what you usually see on the web. I also had some midnight blue and inky black, which I used to represent the night sky.

I used the tube method, where you sew all your strips together, then sew the first strip to the last one. Then you flatten the tube on your cutting table and cut across into varying widths. This gives you a bunch of fabric strips that are sewn into a circle.

You then use your seam ripper to remove the thread between two of the segments of the circle, which turns it into a strip. Each time, you move up or down one segment so that the colors shift when you sew them together. I'm sure that I'm not explaining the technique very well, so if you want to try it, search the web for Free Bargello Quilt patterns. Missouri Star Quilt Company has a video tutorial on You Tube, as does Sewing with Abeygale.

Since this was my first time with bargello, I made some mistakes and it didn't quite turn out the way that I first envisioned. For example. I should have used a few more strips, because my end result was somewhat too long and not quite wide enough. I solved that problem by piecing an extra column from the scraps. All in all, though, I think that it turned out OK.

Since the aurora is mostly green, I used a variegated green thread to quilt wavy lines to simulate the the flowing ribbons of color.