Bargello experiment

I’ve long admired bargello type quilts with their lovely shadings and graceful lines.  I’ve even made a couple.  But I feel a compulsion to work with my scraps and I have trouble cutting strips of fabric from lots of stash fabrics.
So – can I make a bargello quilt using true scrap – as in, leftovers, what is already on hand?
I dug into my bin of 2 1/2” strips to see what I could find.  Not many fabrics in there that had two complete width-of-fabric strips, so I did some piecing, usually finding enough of the same fabric to make my two strips, occasionally subbing in something else that would read the same.  Then I turned to a box of “chunks” and made a few more strip pairs. 
When I laid them out looking for a pleasing combination I began to think I was making one of the world’s ugliest quilts!  There was probably a reason these strips were way down at the bottom of the bin, rejects from many previous projects.  Lots of them are OLD – from the era when all colours were grayed way down, teal blue was popular, and that peachy pink colour (grayed of course) was found with cute country motifs.  I didn’t try to blend colours much but looked at value and tried to imagine what the lines would do once my segments were “bargelloed”.
This is what my strata looked like:

I then proceeded to cut my segments, doing my best to dodge the worst of the seams.





Now that I have a few pieces up on the wall I’m beginning to think there is hope!  (But I admit I’m wondering where I might be able to donate the finished project – it might take some doing to find a home for this one.)

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