Lettering

Here's my Anthem quilt again. I am going to show various construction techniques for this quilt right up through the fourth of July, I think!

This time I will focus on the lettering. I put phrases from our national anthem on this quilt. The phrases I used are:

"...Rockets Red Glare
Bombs Bursting In Air
Gave Proof Through The Night
That Our Flag Was Still There..."

I have had several people ask how I did this, so here is what I did:

I used a purchased lettering guide for the letters, and then used oil paint stick to create the letters through the lettering guide on the fabric. I used a few different colors of oil paint stick successively to get the appearance I was after.

I then machine quilted around each letter to make them pop out a bit. I had to plan out the spacing and location of the letters to make sure they fit and get the staggered line appearance I wanted. The upper photo shows the finised letters, and the lower one shows the lettering in progress, the lettering template and some of the oil paint sticks. I liked the results I got and plan to use this technique again when I do letters on a quilt. I have not liked the results I got from other techniques as much as I like this, and it didn't seem that hard to do.