Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Upcycled Jeans Throw

K-ster is very hard on clothing and goes through jeans and shorts like it's his job.  Well, actually, his job is the reason they fall apart all the time.  Landscaping is not kind to the clothing. 

A pile of jeans that had random holes and weren't useful anymore has been growing and growing and I've been intending to make something out of them.


A few years ago, everyone was carrying around those booty bag purses, but I wasn't in the mood to tackle that project.  I looked at all kinds of things online and finally decided to just go with a quilt.

I cut up all of the jeans and salvaged all that was holey or stained and cut a million squares.  I thought about making a cool pattern but that would have required time and space, neither of which I was going to make the effort to find.  I decided to do a dark/light/dark/light pattern and hope for the best.


I used a jeans needle so I wouldn't have to worry about it breaking.  It wasn't  bad sewing the squares together in strips, but when the seams lined up as I was sewing the strips together, that got a little tough sometimes.  I used a walking foot and that helped a lot.  The backing was kind of slippery, so I kept the walking foot on there for that part too.

It was heavy to work with and it would have been much easier if I had used a bigger table or had someone there to help me mandhandle it into my machine.   I never go for easy when I get these madcap ideas to make something off the top of my head.  Instead, I fight and swear and think there has to be a better way and muddle my way through!

It's not quite a twin but would make a great throw.  K-ster thought it was for him since it was all his jeans.  I was kind of sad see his disappointment when I told him it's going on my etsy.  And really, our decor does not lend itself to a denim throw.

I hand tied it with vareigated floss because it was too big for me to mess around with quilting it.  I used a navy blue twin flat sheet as the backing because it was easier and cheaper than dealing with buying material.  I really want to use something I already had, but this grew bigger than I was expecting. 


I used polyester batting.  I wasn't going to use batting at all because I figured it was plenty heavy and warm, but I thought you might be able to feel all of the seams through the backing, and that would be weird.

I was going to sew it so that the seams would fray and it would look more like a rag quilt, but I was already underway when I realized my seams weren't really big enough to let that happen, so the seams are on the inside.

Have you seen how stinkin' much these go for on etsy????  I listed mine a little lower than most.  You can click to my esty page on the right hand sidebar over there.  We'll see what happens!  At least there isn't a pile of jeans staring at me every time I got into the laundry room!

Linking here and here and here and here and here and here and here.

2 comments:

  1. Hehe I should buy it for kster for Christmas.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Then I'm going to fill l-ster's closet with graphic tees and hoodies.

      Delete

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