Sunday, May 11, 2003

Alphabet Quilts

At some point in the late 90s somebody brought to our guild the idea of making alphabet - or ABC - quilts. In this type of quilt, every square represents a letter of the alphabet. One can use novelty fabric in which each square includes an images which start with each of the letters. This is what I have always done. Others are much more creative and elaborate about it. The idea caught on like wild fire in our guild, and at first a bunch of us made ABC quilts for a charity project - unfortunately I do not remember where the quilts went. The quilt above is my charity ABC quilt from 1999.
I had so much fun making the first one that I proceeded to make a Danish alphabet quilt for my nephew Jens, seen above with his quilt, for his 4th birthday in 2000. In this quilt I also paper pieced all the letters of the alphabet - including the three letters in the Danish alphabet which are not included in the English alphabet - and placed them in random order around the border. After studying the quilt for a while and figuring out what the idea was, Jens informed me that next time I needed to put each letter of the alphabet next to the square representing that letter.
So, when I made another quilt for Jens' sister Anna in 2003, I did as suggested and the result is seen above.