Sometimes You Need

A Small Alphabet

If you've ever sewn a pieced alphabet, you've noticed that a lot of them can be quite large and take a lot of sewing.

Even if you haven't noticed this, I have. I wanted a pieced alphabet that was small, very small. And simple to sew. So I designed Foothills.

The letters in Foothills can be made as small as 1 1/2" x 1 1/2". In which case the triangles in the corners are 1/4" x 1/4", finished size. This is fussy but do-able.

If the letters are 3"x 3", which is still a lot smaller than most pieced alphabets, then the corner triangles are 1/2"x 1/2", finished size. Anybody can sew these using the connector corner method.


The Foothills letters are a combination of simple piecing and some straight-line satin stitching. First the outline of a letter is pieced together. Then a heavy thread and a wide satin stitch are used to fill in the details.

Below is the complete Foothills alphabet. On the left the piecing for each letter is shown. On the right the stitching is shown. The grid is there to help you size the letters and locate where the stitching goes.

To see the revised M go here.

To see the revised W go here.

So you can see what this alphabet looks like in use I've added this example:

This is the fifth complete alphabet I've posted in my blog. The other four are:
Heritage
Deerfoot
Acadia
Patchwork (Part 1)
Patchwork (Part 2)
Patchwork (Part 3)
Patchwork (Part 4)

All of these alphabets are here for your personal use, but not for commercial use.