Piano Keys

Work on the T-shirt quilt has commenced! I swore that somewhere in the apartment, I had a bag of bigger chunks of t-shirts from when I originally was cutting the pieces, but it seems like I may have thrown it out in a fit of organization. So I was left with a bag full of tiny little chunks like these:
And the rest of the the triangles that I had already cut:
Which I just separated into lights and darks for now.
Out of the rest of the scraps, I cut 2" by 1" bricks. I would have loved to make them bigger, but the pieces were really small, and that was all I could eke out. I also cut some black bricks to alternate with.
So with my bricks and some black strips, this is where I'm at now. I think I'm going to have to make a thrift store trip for some more black t-shirts. I'm definitely thinking of doing a sawtooth border with the left over triangles, and I'm playing with the idea of using a gray t-shirt too, for some contrast. Maybe a sawtooth border with lights and the gray, then one with black and the darks?

I've also been looking at countless pictures of Turkish and middle eastern jackets and vests to get inspiration for my jacket piece. My next post, I'll put up some of the images I'm looking at. I think I've decided to go with leather as my braiding materials, I have quite a bit of really thin leather from thrift store pants and jackets, and it braids up really nicely (bonus--I don't have to sew it into a tube because it doesn't fray!)
It also gives me an option for thicker and thinner braids, and I do have both some gray and black leather. I can also use the leather or suede side of the braid for extra variety! I'm not looking foward to cutting many many strips of leather at about 1/16th of an inch though...