Letters, selvages and coins

I'm making names for my Advice from Home quilt, and I decided to start a leader-ender project while I was sewing the letters. So a 19-letter name came up with about twice as many strips sewn together as pictured below. I was using my 2.5 by 4.5 inch pre-cut bricks and just kept sewing between letters. Right now I'd have enough for a baby quilt, but I'm hoping to get it to throw size.

My son's name, Eric, as well as his last name (blocked out by the strip set) will go on the Advice from Home quilt I was working on last fall. I'm also making my own name and the date, and that will lengthen it from its current size of 55 by 60 to nearly single size.

I've been playing with the selvages, and Karen over at Selvage Blog gave me the idea of making a selvage basket block. I'm sending this one to Mennonite Central Committee for their basket quilt project. Scroll down a few posts to to see the string pieced one I made for the same cause.

Karen recommends sewing selvages to a foundation, but I'm experimenting sewing them to each other, as I did on the basket and the nine patch block below. I make my new fabric by overlapping the selvage edge on the raw edge, then cut the piece to size when I'm done. On the basket below, I used teeny bits and graduated up to the wide strips on the top, cut it into the basket shape, and then sewed it on the black black and covered the raw edges with more selvages, using the flip and sew method for the raw edge, and then top stitched it down. I also bordered it with selvages because I thought it looked too black. Once the seam allowances are taken off, the block will be bordered with a thin strip of colour and the white selvage edge.

In this 13 inch block, I was playing with the selvages which had coloured squares instead of circles along the selvages.