Quilted Delights: Valentine Heart Bargello

Another UFO off the list!

On Valentines day 2021 I decided I needed a big Valentines Day quilt. I had seen a little quilt like this on Pinterest, but I wanted mine to be a bit bigger, so I played around in EQ8 and came up with this.

I pulled fabric from of my Personal Island Batik stash and used the 2.5 AccuQuilt strip die to cut my strips.

I was given the 2.5 inch strip die with my Island Batik Ambassador box a couple years ago. Originally I had reservations about these strip dies....

I love all the their triangle and odd shape dies, but surely I could cut straight lines faster and with less waste on my own. But, as I was hand cutting strips without the die for another project, I realized every 4 or 5 strips I had to straighten my edge up again. When cutting 60 strips that's a lot of waste. Probably the same if not more than what the edges of the die would produce.

I also realized I was spending the same amount of prep time I would be using with the AccuQuilt die as I was layered and stacked fabrics to rotary cut. Plus I only like to cut 4 layers at a time with a rotary cutter, more than that and things get wonky.

And sometimes my ruler would move ever so slightly and I'd shave off an extra 1/16 of fabric at the end of a strip. With the die I get perfect strips every time.

So with that other project I ended up debunking all my pre-conceived notions and have come to love using these strip dies, and I was excited to use it to cut out all the strips for this Heart Bargello.

Once my strips were cut and sewn into a tube, I cut out the columns.

Next was the challenge of opening the tube a the right spot.

I would say this is the hardest part of making a Bargello quilt. Making sure you break the tube at the correct color. If you have somewhere to lay out the strips as you go it helps.