As you may have already noticed, I love making the alphabet! My little grandsons are SO smart and know so much already. They love letters! I already made them an alphabet quilt, which they also love to sit on and find the letters as you ask them. Have I mentioned how much I adore them? :)
So when I saw these letters on this Pinterest post, I had to make them. Of course, as I'm reading the post, I knew there were much easier ways and methods than what this particular post had you do. So, I've had a few comments about the letters and what I did so I decided I would just post my own tutorial.
So I began by printing out the letters from the Pinterest post. I then picked out what fabric I wanted to use. I went through my boxes that I have separated into colors and decided I wanted random fabrics and also a sturdy back. I keep old jeans for just a project like this! So I cut enough squares for all my letters of both jean fabric as well as all my scraps. I also cut all my batting squares.
Now here is where I would have done it differently from the beginning and where I will give you my learn-from-my-mistake lesson.... I initially cut all my batting from my scraps of Warm&Natural. That is my favorite batting for my quilts, however, for this project I would not use that again. When I went back to do this tutorial and make more letters, I used fusible polyester batting which worked FAR better! The cotton batting was too prone to coming out of the sides and making a mess, especially with little fingers handling them constantly.
So once I had all my letters cut, fabric squares, backing squares and batting pieces cut, I began by fusing the pieces together by ironing them.
I layered them together and simply ironed them, on both sides.
Make sure both sides are completely fused.
Now here is where my tutorial and the other differs and becomes a much simpler process. The tutorial I started off with has you cut out each letter and then trace around it on the fabric. That is very time intensive! I decided to just simply pin the letter pattern onto the fabric and stitch directly on the paper. This creates a perforation which just simply tears off.
Go all the way around and then make sure you get any center parts as well.
Here is what it should look like when you are done.
Now here is the fun part! I folded the paper and pressed along the stitching line and simply tore it off. Go all the way around as well as any center pieces. Then just pull it off and out of the seam areas. You should have a little center piece left and just pull that out as well.
Little tiny bits of paper might get stuck in your stitching but those just easily come right out. Easy peasy!!
Now you have a bunch of letters stitched onto your fabric pieces. The first set of letters I did, I used pinking shears and cut around them. They looked adorable as you can see by my first picture in this post. However, they left fuzz everywhere! I ended up having to zigzag them anyway.
So you have choices...you can zigzag them, you can use pinking shears and then zigzag.... But just know, they should be finished on the edges in some way. The letter I am using for this tutorial, I just simply zigzagged the edges. Honestly, the kids you are making this for do not care. Not at all!
Of course I had to make a little bag for them to hold the letters in. I mean, how cute is this fabric!?
I decided to make at least 2 of each vowel for now. I would like to do doubles of all the letters eventually. For now though, they can spell elephant and that's really all that matters!!
They are just pure joy, pure fun!