1) Your favorite nice thing to call someone with the light colour as background. For example, my favourite would be "sweetness".
2) Your favourite naughty thing to call someone with the dark colour as background. For example, I have been known to enjoy calling people "turd". I am fully on board with swear/curse words. Be honest! If you aren't comfortable piecing a curse word, judicious use of *!# etc are welcome.
3) Your name with your choice of background, light or dark. Or your initials if your name is monstrously long :)
To give some inspiration I put together a pinterest board with examples of both upper and lower case pieced letters http://www.pinterest.com/
I want to preface this tutorial by saying that I am aware of Tonya Ricucci's book "Word Play Quilts", but I do not own this book nor have I ever read it. But in deference to the fact that many of the examples I've studied to be able to reverse engineer the technique are based on her book, I'm not going to include the entire alphabet piecing scheme on my blog.
I am going to walk through two different methods for piecing a word using a single letter as the base example, both paper piecing and free style piecing. I've included suggested configurations for the letters in the bee packet but feel free to get wonky, vary the thickness of the pieces and invent your own methods of making letters! The individual letters in your word don't all need to be uniform height, you can play around a little!
Paper Pieced Letters
Plan out how big you want your letter, and a guide to how it will be pieced on some thin paper, drawing in the position of all the seams. Identify the center of your letter, here the background in the middle of the letter A. This is the foundation piece to which all other parts of the block will be sewn. I'm going to show white fabric for the background (helpful!) and red for the letters.
Place a piece of fabric large enough to cover the center section plus 1/4" seam allowance all the way round. Overlap a piece of the contrasting color fabric that is large enough to cover the top bar of the "A" plus 1/4" seam allowance, then sew the two strips together onto the paper along the line you drew.
Press the red strip you just sewed up and continue adding a strip of red for the middle bar of the "A" to the bottom edge of the background fabric. As you can see I didn't strictly adhere to my free-handed pattern.
Add a final strip of the background fabric to fill in the remaining negative space. You can trim excess fabric in the seams by folding the foundation paper out of the way.
Add a strip of red to the left hand side to make an "F"....
... and then to the right to make an "A". Press everything flat and trim to get square/straight edges.
Flip the block over and tear away the paper.
Free-style Pieced Letters
Cut several strips of background and foreground fabric. From my own noodling, 3/4" will give you a very skinny strip and is really annoying to press so this is the smallest I would recommend cutting.
Cut your strips into smaller sections to map out your letter (in this case "t").
Start sewing the smaller sections together to form larger units.
Straightening up the edges as you go makes this much easier, then attach the long piece on the left.
And square up.
I'm not the biggest fan of this method for two reasons. One, I had to keep a mental picture of the final letter in my head instead of right in front of me on the paper, and two, OMG the seams. There are a lot of seams and it gets annoying to press them all neatly. Paper piecing really reduced the seam bulk.
Assembling Your Word
Once you've pieced all you letters you need to sew them up into a word. I used 3/4"-1" strips of background fabric attached the the right side of the first letter (t). Then I added background to the top and bottom of the next letter (i)...
... and attached it to the "t" so it was slightly offset.
Then just keep going adding spacers and letters...
That's me!
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