About
Because I could never get those pesky corners to line up!
This project takes a while, but it much easier than it looks. It's a good project if you and your serger are just getting acquainted because all the sewing is in straight lines.
Traditional piecing (as is usually done for the top of a quilt) involves too much precision. Crazy piecing is, well, crazy hard!
Here's my compromise. Because you only have to be precise in cutting one side of each piece, cutting goes much faster. Because each strip is all the same height, sewing them all together goes much faster.
You may be able to adapt this to a sewing machine. I don't know. But if you try it, make sure you put a denim needle in your sewing machine. (And post in the comments to let us know how it turned out.)
Note: I'd guess you would need 10-12 pairs of jeans but that is an estimate. I had some scraps from my denim picnic blanket, but then, some of the jeans I used were stained or ripped so I didn’t use all of them.
My final blanket was 7.25 feet (2.2 meters) by 4.5 feet (1.37 meters).
This project was first featured on my blog Painting on the Ceiling.
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You Will Need
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Step 1Cut up blue jeans.
I kept the pockets, as I used one in this blanket and the rest will come in handy someday.
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Step 2Discard the inseams, zippers, hems, etc. (I donate mine. A local charity that has a thrift store sells unwearable clothing to a paper company, and so I label it “rags” and drop it off to go in with all the other cloth getting recycled.)
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Step 3Iron the pieces smooth.
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Step 4Cut the lighter denim into 4-inch sections. Cut those sections into random lengths. I tried to avoid cutting anything 4x4ish so that I wouldn’t get confused as to which way was up.
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Step 5Cut the darker denim into 8 inch sections. Cut those sections into random lengths. Again, I tried to avoid cutting anything 8x8ish so that I wouldn’t get confused as to which way was up.
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Step 6You’ll end with two piles like this:
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Step 7Sort them into three or four piles by size. This is so you can avoid putting similarly sized pieces next to each other.
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Step 8Then take two pieces, each of a contrasting size but a similar color, and stack them one on top of the other, putting right sizes together. (Right sides together = the bottom one with the outer fabric facing up and the top one with the outer fabric facing down. Think of it like a kiss.) I tried to avoid putting the same color of denim next to each other. When you are working with the lighter color, you can make the inside of the jeans into the right side if you like, in order to avoid having two of the same color next to each other.
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Step 9Continue this process, stacking the pairs on top of one another.
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Step 10Then run the piece through your serger, sewing two together at a time. Don’t stop to tie off or anything—just run them all together. You’ll get a long streamer that looks like this.
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Step 11
Cut the thread between the pairs.
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Step 12Pair up the pairs! You’ll then have another stack next to your serger, but this time when you sew the pairs together the resulting sections will have four pieces each instead of two.
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Step 13
You guessed it—sew the four pieces together to get sections of eight.
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Step 14Soon you’ll have one long piece. (As in, perhaps 34 feet or so!) It will be much longer than your blanket will turn out to be, but don’t worry about that.
Do the same with the second shade of denim.
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Step 15The strips get really long, but that's part of the fun!
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Step 16Do you have enough? Good question. I wanted my blanket to be about 7 feet long and about 4 or 4.5 feet wide. So one row of 8 inches plus one row of 4 inches would be about 12 inches, if you ignore seam allowances for the moment. (Seam allowance = fabric length lost in the seam when two pieces are sewn together. It’s not much but it adds up.)
So you would think I’d need about 7 rows each to get a 7 foot blanket. Seam allowances eat up a lot, though, plus you lose some from cutting to even up your rows, and what with one thing and another, I did 9 rows of each color (18 total), for a blanket that was about 7.25 feet long. I had enough for 4.5 feet wide by the time I stopped piecing. So I had one strip about 40.5 feet long and 8-inches high and another one 40.5 feet long and 4 inches high. About. Actually I sewed a little more than that, but that’s ok. I’d rather do that than measure constantly!
But measuring eventually has to be done.
I measured 4.5 feet from the edge of my sewing table and marked the spot with masking tape. (See? It's to the left of the roll in the photo.) Then I cut 4.5 sections of both light and dark denim. All this will vary depending on the size of your blanket.
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Step 17
Sew the 4.5 inch strips to each other in pairs, much like how you sewed the small pieces together. Make sure you don’t have any little holes!
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Step 18
Serge the four edges of your completed blanket. You are done!
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Step 19This is what the back looks like.
This is why I’m calling it a blanket, not a quilt. Quilting is technically the tiny, artful stitches that hold together three layers – fabric, batting, and then fabric.
I hope this inspires you!
Have a great summer holiday!