Pieced Lettering

Part 4

You may be wondering about the name of this alphabet. Why Shaganappi?

I've designed a lot of alphabets to be used in quilts. Naming them was always a problem until I hit upon the idea of naming them after neigbourhoods in the City of Calgary where I live.

The neighbourhood of Shaganappi gets its name from the Cree word referring to the bison hide lacings that held Red River ox carts together.

At first glance it may not be obvious how to piece S.

It's done by breaking the S into three vertical pieces, then breaking those pieces into smaller simpler pieces many of which  repeat.

W is just M turned upside down.

The 4 center units of X are paper pieced.

I think the simplest method of paper piecing is the freezer paper method.

It has the added advantage that you can reuse the freezer paper templates again and again.




I've been posting 6 letters each day. Today I'm going to add a seventh letter you probably aren't familiar with, the letter LT.

If you make the letters L and T in the usual way and then use them in a word like Quilt, something unfortunate happens. The T doesn't look like its part of the word

The letters L and T need to be combined into a single unit so that they can overlap and have the T become part of the word.













More tomorrow....