Strip-pieced letters

I've been making letters again, using a strip-pieced method to get the letters more uniform. I like wonky letters too, but sometimes I want them all to be more or less the same size. Tonya at Lazy Gal Quilting is the one who invented this letter method, and I'm just tweaking it a bit here. You may have to read her letter tutorials first if you've never made letters before.

I'm going to show you how to make a lower case a, then e and d. The same method can be used for ones with similar shapes: p, b, q, g, u and o.

Step 1: Cut narrow strips of letter and background fabric and sew together lengthwise. Do the same for wide strips. I'm using 3/4 inch for the narrow and 1 1/2 inches for the wide. Cut extra background and letter strips in each size (not shown.) In my case, red is the colour of the letters, and white is the background.


Step 2. We're making lower case a. Cut 1 1/2 inch chunk off the wide strip set.

Step. 2: Sew a narrow red strip on left side of strip set, log cabin style. (Many of these letters are built log cabin style, starting from the middle.)

Step 3: Sew another narrow red strip on the top, log cabin style. You've now made a lower case C, the beginnings of a d or g or Q, or with one more strip on the right side, an O. Cut a piece of the narrow strip set to fit the width of the letter for the top of the lower case a and sew it on the top.

Step. 4 Cut a piece of the wide red strip to complete the a.
Step. 6: Sew the strip. Trim the edges if necessary. Congratulations, you've now made an a!

Step. 7: Here's the same sort of method using a strip set to make lower case e and D.

Step. 8: Keep going until you've made all the letters you need. Here you can see I used the large strip set in the B, e, d and a, and the smaller one in the top of the B, e, and a. The n and r use a different method. Check with Tonya on that one.

Step. 9: This is my first tutorial. Let me know what's clear and what's not. Thanks for staying with me this far.