More Wonky Words

I really enjoyed making a trial run of wonky letters a few months ago. Sadly, life has intervened and I haven't had a chance to do anything with them.

However, just a few weeks ago, Lazy Gal Tonya put out a call for free pieced words for her "Halloween Noises" quilt. I figured this was a good time to make some words with a purpose. I originally signed up to do a word in a "rounded" font. After a couple of trial runs, I figured out I was trying to fly a bit too high and should stick with what I know. So here's my Halloween noise: "Hoot". (Unfortunately, these are horrible pictures since it's raining outside; they don't do justice to the cool orange animal print.)



I put huge, neutral borders on it because Tonya has plans to hand quilt this and I wanted to leave her lots of room to do whatever she wanted with it. It looks very tiny in the below picture, but the word itself is almost 10" across.

Wonky Letters

Lately, I've been struck by the art of free pieced quilting. I'm a bit fan of the look and style as well as the variety of things you can create by putting words/phrases/letters into a quilt.

This weekend, I sat down and started experimenting. I used Tonya's wonderful tutorial for free pieced letters as well as Brenda's mini-tutorial on how to make the letters more uniform.



I was going to do letters in multiple colors but quickly realized that for a first try, it was much easier to do them all one colors so I could reused units and use a little bit of strip piecing to make it go faster.



You might notice that I didn't do many angles. All letters that could be pieced without them were. Hence, my "m", "w" and a few other letters aren't quite what I'd like. but it was certainly easier that way. In fact only 4 of my letters have angles: "k", "v", "x", and "z". The K and V were easy (and I love how the K turned out!) but the X and Z about killed me. I have a hard time visualizing how seam allowances affect the piecing and ended up ripping several times when I realized the finished letter was going to be about .5 inches wide by the time I got done with it.



All that being said, I really enjoyed this exercise and was extremely chuffed with how they came out. My husband doesn't like them as much as my normal, non-wonky pieced work, but I predicted that. He's a very orderly, likes-things-in-their-place type of guy, so I was not surprised that the wonky letters offended his sensibilities. However, I loved them so much that I just laughed it off. I did a couple of trial layouts with some blocks I have but didn't like it enough to make it into a top. So for now, they are on my design wall (piece of batting draped over my office door).