3273 K
January 2019

What do you do when the scraps get out of control? Make a quilt of course! In the process of putting away my latest project’s scraps, I found I could no longer squeeze scraps into my blues bin. It was like packing a really full suitcase, but even if I had sat on it, I was just not going to be able to cram even one more teeny weeny scrap in it.

So I dumped the scraps onto my cutting table and started by cutting 2.5″ x 3.5″ rectangles from every piece of fabric that was big enough, ending up with close to 500 rectangles. My original plan was to just join them randomly: since there were so many different fabrics, this would work well. As I began organizing and grouping them by their color values, the idea of doing this scrappy quilt as a twist and turn Bargello came to me – an idea that had been tickling at the back of my brain for awhile.

A couple years ago, I had made my first Bargello quilt based off a pattern I had from a 1993 issue of a Quilters Newsletter magazine. During the process of making it, I Google searched Bargello quilts and was awed by the twist and turn Bargello quilt designs. At that time, I was ready to move onto something different, but the idea of doing a twist and turn Bargello quilt at some future time seemed appealing.

I sometimes like to use obscure names for my quilts: sometimes they are something personally meaningful to me, but sometimes, I just like quirky. I typically don’t divulge the deeper meaning, but I think even a Google search on this one would be challenging to find what 3273 K is. This is 3273 Kelvin, the temperature at which a flame burns blue, creating a pinpoint blue flame (also one of my favorite David Grey songs).

This was donated in March 2019 to the County of Ventura, Children & Family Services, for a foster child.