Blues

My stash has turquoise and aqua, but very few true blues. Just not my color, I guess.
I pulled what I had and then when to my LQS, which had a blues sale in April. I was going to use reds for wonky strip piecing for a quilt background, but with all the red in my family room, I think it would be too much to hang a mostly-red quilt there. Right now I'm waiting to see how blue the color sheet in the washer will be when the load is done.
And I finished this! Tonya, it will be in the mail today or tomorrow! What I learned from this:
1) You do loosen up as you make letters. I made these in spelling order, and the i is definitely my favorite.
2) When piecing wonky piano keys, do it on a foundation. (Some of us learn the hard way.)
3) When the fabric has a wonky design, like these chilies, the piecing can still be fairly straight and it will look wonkier than it is.

Wonky borders

I joined the letter blocks to spell my name for Tonya's collection. It was a little boring with plain yellow borders, so I decided to make some wonky piano keys with the fabric I had used for the letters and some green chili pepper fabric I also had, and while I was cutting pieces it occurred to me that a little red would go a long way towards livening it up a bit.
I'm sure there's a wonky piano key tutorial out there, but it didn't occur to me to check. I cut strips of fabric, then cut the strips into equal size pieces a good bit longer than I needed, to allow for trimming the uneven edges you get with wonky pieces. After chain piecing a bunch of pairs, I laid them around the block and decided the red would be better as an accent since my eye was drawn there, so I chopped the reds down and then joined the pairs into a strip.

I knew I'd need to trim uneven edges, but this was ridiculous! (Kind of a neat curve, though.) So I frogged a few seams and paid attention to joining them at angles that wouldn't cause such unevenness.
This I can live with! It'll trim it to straighten the edges and it will lie nice and flat. I had wanted more angularity, but I now see that I would have had to have cut my pieces much longer to be able to trim enough -- either that, or use templates, which totally defeats the purpose. I could also have pieced them on a foundation strip, which would have been smart. Next time!
The pieced strip on top looks very different from the loose pairs on the bottom.

Here's one more quilt from the Chicago quilt show. This one is made from old shirts, mostly striped ones, pieced to look like furrows in a field. I really like it. Looks like the great midwest as seen from an airplane. There's a very soothing feel to it despite all the lines.


Finally, do any of you have some blogging tips or tricks to share? I'm teaching a class of active seniors how to blog (using Blogger), and want to be sure I give them as much helpful advice as I can. Thank you!