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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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Phoenix M. favorited Denim Blanket ~ A Simple Serger Project 11 Jan 18:43
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J. Pario commented on her project Denim Blanket ~ A Simple Serger Project 24 Jul 18:48
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dippydiscoball favorited Denim Blanket ~ A Simple Serger Project 05 Jul 17:51
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J. Pario published her project Denim Blanket ~ A Simple Serger Project 27 Mar 01:13
You Will Need
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Step 8
Then 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 11
Cut the thread between the pairs.
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Step 13
You guessed it—sew the four pieces together to get sections of eight.
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Step 16
Do 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!
Have a great summer holiday!