The Bargello pattern creates beautiful quilts, so I decided to try the same effect with paper. I have created larger pieces on canvas using handmade paper, but here I used scraps of decorative papers to create smaller versions suitable for card fronts.
The basic "recipe" of the Bargello is to glue down strips of color in gradiating hues (for example, light blues to medium blues to dark blues). You can do this with one color or several colors in one piece. Once all strips are glued down, butted against each other, the piece is turned a 1/4 turn and new strips are made by cutting across all of the colors in varying widths from fat to skinny. These are then arranged on your surface alternating thin and fat strips and moving the strips up or down with each added strip to create a movement.
This photo shows several strips of paper that have been glued down onto lightweight copy paper and trimmed out. For the next step you would turn this block and cut new strips by cutting ACROSS all existing colors.
"Shades of Blue" uses scraps of decorative papers and cardstocks with darkest hues on the top and bottom. These strips are set off with a brass fern piece and the gold color continued to the paper corners. How much of a "wave" you want your pattern to create is entirely up to you. You can do shallow ups and downs, or start up and come all the way down in a diagonal...the variations are endless.
There are so many different papers that can be utilized in this method. In "Soar" I used magazine pages. I cut out sections of papers based solely on color in the page, not images or text. I wanted to try to get as much pure color as possible and not many images that would distort the color, although text on the colors added a nice interest. Don't worry too much about the photo if the color is right. You probably can't see the photo of a half-naked woman in a skin lotion ad, can you? It's the peachy color of the skin I was going for, and because it is cut up so small, the actual image is hardly discernible. I followed the same Bargello pattern and added a gold metallic dragonfly sticker over the pattern.
"Autumn Shells" was created by coloring old book pages with inks straight from an inkpad. I save some of my book pages when I'm creating Altered Books and have to remove some pages. These inked pages were then cut and put together in the Bargello pattern. Clusters of beautiful shell stickers were placed at the bottom and a bold sentiment stamp in black finished it off nicely. The words are irrelevant as they are chopped up, and I alternate placing text strips right side up and upside down.
This card was created from the strip panel in the "Step 1" photo. The difference in this piece is that the strips were adhered to the panel in a diagonal direction, allowing strips to run off the panel. Then the strips were trimmed off before adhering panel to card front. A large calligraphy sticker was layered over the Bargello here, and a hydrangea sticker finished a beautiful, serene card that would work for about any occasion.
Try the Bargello method with paper you have on hand and see how many colors and varieties you can achieve... you will love the results!
