Strips and Stripes - Bargello

This month in the Paper Wishes swaps it's all about strips and stripes! One of the fun things you can do to make great backgrounds for your cards is taking strips of paper and making Bargello patterns. Bargello is a needlework term and you see a lot of Bargello embroidery and tapestry work. Google it and see what you find!

In this demo I'm making strips of paper 1/2" wide. You could also use a striped patterned paper and get the same effect for less work! Once you get a good collection of strips, glue or tape them down to a piece of background paper or cardstock.

Then, cut 1/2 inch strips crosswise. I find that I do best when I mark the lines on the back and just cut with scissors. If I try to do it in my paper trimmer, the layers of paper are just too thick and sometimes the trimmer will lift up what I've pasted down. If you've used thin papers it might work.

Here are all my cut strips:

Before you decide how you want to glue them down on your final card panel, you can play with them at this point. It's fun to rearrange them and see what kind of patterns you can get!

Once you find a pattern you like, glue or tape them down to your card panel. Then trim off the excess:

Here's my final card panel:

...and the final card. Here I just added a strip of vellum, and a cutout from the Hot Off the Press Classic Creative Cardmaker's Pack: