Improv piano key tutorial

Let me know if you have any questions. For this I used t-shirts that were interfaced with a lightweight fusible non-woven interfacing. The strip sections are short because I used little kid sized t-shirts. You can use longer strips out of t-shirt fabric as well as quilting cotton. At the end of this tutorial I will post some pictures of other quilts I made using this technique. Here are my two strips of fabric, one white and one pink layer on top of each other.

Trim off the top edge. The reason for doing this is because it makes it easier to align the top edge of the irregular pieces. Just keep reading and this will make sense.

Next I trimmed off the bottom of the strips simply because the strip was wider than I needed. I left a bit extra since I will cut a clean edge on both sides after I sew the sections together. I want the border to be 6 1/2" before I sew it on so I trimmed the strips to 7".

Slice the strips into pieces. Your piano key wedges can be thin, or fat, it is whatever you want.

Shuffle the pieces into two sets of keys

I moved one set over to the sewing machine. You will be sewing the pieces together from left to right.

Here are the two far left pieces. I flipped the white piece over the pink and lined them up at the top. Since the seam line is not straight, the pink just peeks out from under the white. I sew these with 1/4" seams.

We are working with curves here so as you sew down the seam, adjust the pieces to meet.

Continue to add one piece at a time to the right side of the strip set. Here are both sets sewn together

I want to join these two strip sets together so I over lapped the ends and sliced threw them. Remove the cut off pieces and sew the two sections together.

Done. I won't do the final trimming until I sew the entire length of the border together.

Here are some other quilts I have made using this technique.

In this quilt I did pretty much the same technique to get the inner border with the  wacky triangles.