alphabet3pf

Tonya's Alphabet!
Free-Style Letters Primer
Page 3

This is "Bricks," named for the shape of the blocks. (I'm not really into naming my quilts - whatever is easiest to remember is usually what sticks, tho sometimes the names change every few years as I forget what I used to call them.)

This is the quilt that my Tonya bruise block fell out of. My name was supposed to be the last brick in the wall, but it just didn't work. Too purple to go there. Plus I would have had to drop out an adjective, and I kinda liked all those.

I didn't put punctuation in the quilt, but I think of it as "Be yourself, be dazzling, be joyful..." but it could also be read "Be yourself: dazzling, joyful..."

These are all words I'd use to describe myself, at least the me I'd like to be. Sure, there are lots of other adjectives that I could have in there, but that was what I needed to hear back then. And I wanted fun, exciting words. Be honest, be sincere, be kind, be good-hearted: all excellent choices, but not what I had in mind for this quilt.

I'd challenged myself to use every letter of the alphabet in this quilt. Then I experimented with making some letters tall and narrow (imaginative) and others wide (bold). I used the black with speckly grey bits and all the rest are commercially available hand-dyes.

So if you've made a bunch of free-pieced letters and don't know what to do with them, here's a project for you. What shall you be?

Capital J

Capital J is another letter that I could have made easier, but didn't. Easy is boring and ya'll don't want me to get bored do you? Things get ugly when I get bored... I wander off and never finish the alphabet, ba ha ha.

If you want to do this one the easy way, start out with a square from a medium-sized strip of background fabric and sew it to a strip of letter fabric and trim. If you want the extra flourish, then create something that looks like this:

And no matter which way you've started, add this section to an letter strip, as follows, and trim.

Some background fabric is added next to that and the whole thing capped off with a strip of letter fabric, although actually you could leave that off. When I look at the picture above, it does look like a J to me.

Capitals E and F

For my F, I used a medium-sized chunk of letter fabric, sewn to a skinny background fabric, sewn to a skinny letter fabric, sewn to a wide background. I did make a couple of slices along the left side and the top to get more of an angle on this one. For the E, I started in the middle, cuz I like having that middle section be shorter than the other two legs, then added from there.

And here they are are finished. The F has more of a straight bottom than you can tell from this photo, though the right side does angle.

Capital B

This is the way I make a B (I'm sure there are others). I start out with two separate bits of background, one a square and one a rectangle. Square gets attached to a skinny letter strip and evened up. This then gets added to a letter fabric so that it looks like the section on top. (similar to a 1/2 log cabin) The rectangle gets added longways to a wider l-fabric: I want this bottom section to be longer/wider than the top section. I then add a skinny strip as pictured.

Next step is to add a wider bit of background fabric to the upper section. Add what will be the lower part of the letter to the bottom section.

These two sections are then joined and added to the widest strip of letter fabric.

Sometimes I'm not sure if I'm explaining all of this well enough. I learn and figure things out from looking at pictures, so I have a tendency to think that everyone learns the same way.