Bargello

Bargello is first an embroidery: long upright stitches in steps, also called Florentine work and flame stitch. The name comes from a set of 17th-century chairs in the Bargello palace in Florence, worked in "punto unghero", Hungarian point. The oldest pieces are from the 1300s from Hungary, Italy and Britain, and the embroidery had a revival in the 1960s and 70s.

Quilters borrowed the steps: strips of the same height but different widths, moved one square for each row. The oldest dated bargello quilt we have found is Georgia Bonesteel's "Bargello Dress" of 1986 in the museum in Lincoln, and the books followed in the 1990s: Shirley Liby 1993, Marilyn Doheny and Marge Edie 1994, later Beth Ann Williams and Eileen Wright. Who sewed the first one, we do not know.

A band of strips in the colour scale is sewn into a tube and cut across into strips, narrow and wide as the drawing says. Each strip is unpicked at a new place, so the colours move a step; narrow strips give steep flames, wide ones flat waves.

It is the same idea as Trip Around the World, only with strips of different widths, and the band is related to Rail Fence. The colours do all the work, so choose a scale from light to dark or a colour wheel.