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Stage 4
Pant (and skirt) count: 11
My braided rug has been sitting neglected since the spring. Finally last week I had the sewing machine out to quickly make a curtain to hang in one of our doorways to block drafts. The curtain was quick work and the sewing machine was out, so I added a few more roll of fabric to my rug and braided them up. As you can see the last two loops are just loosely wrapped around the rug. Now the next step is to get back to sewing the braid onto itself and making the rug bigger. That will wait for another day.
I have made at least four quilts as wedding presents for friends and in the Spring of 2007 as my wedding approached, I decided I needed to make a lap quilt for two people for my husband-to-be and I. I have a large collection of used jeans and decided to make our quilt out of these. I also chose the jeans because I enjoy the weight the lend to a quilt. I tried to vary the colors of the jeans and piece them together in a well-balanced way to create a variety of lights and darks.
Our quilt is made of 5" jean squares with a 5 inch border of strips that were remainders when I recovered the fabric from the jeans. The quilt ended up being 68 inches by 55 inches because of the number of squares I was able to cut. The quilt is backed and bound with a blue cotton print. I used Warm and Natural Cotton Batting. I tied the quilt with a cotton yarn.
We keep our quilt in our living room on the couch.
Stage 3 of my rug.
Pants (and skirt) count: 8
Obviously I haven't worked much on it since February. This week was school vacation and in addition to working on my rug, I started my garden. We seemed to have jumped from Winter to Summer with temperatures up to 80 this week. I'm betting that it won't get too cold before the end of May when the last frost date is (or that if it does, I can cover my seedlings to protect them.) So last weekend we repaired the raised beds here on the property, and turned over the soil and plotted out my squares. This week I've seeded dill, beets, spinach, mesclun and peas outside and many more things inside to transplant latter. Spring is so exciting!
Stage 2 of the Rug
Pants Count: 6 (but 1/2 a leg of 2 pairs of pants remains for later)
This week has been my school vacation and I've been without a car for most of it. Its given me time to clean house and start some craft projects I've been meaning to do for a while. I've also done a lot of web surfing about these projects and have been inspired by others work and works in progress, so I thought I'd post mine.
I began a braided rug made from pants. If you know me well, you know I have a stash of old pants, mostly jeans, but a there is a fair amount of khaki and cordoroy in there too. Originally this was intended for purses, brownbags specifically, but I haven't made any of those in a while and so for now, this is ripe material for my rug. Considering there are 6 tubs of material, I think I'll have plenty for this project. Our house has a room we call the dining room that stretches the width of the house. It's an odd room with the outside door we use most often and doors to 5 other rooms off of it. So we have the dining room table in part, and a settee in front of the fireplace, but we have this large area that's empty because its surrounded by doors. It needs a rug to define the space.
So here is the beginning of the braided rug. Pants count: 3.
When I picked the name for this blog, I choose greens for the gardening and jeans for the crafts because I like to make things out of jeans. It seems like there has been more greens than jeans and in fact, few crafts made of jeans at all. This quilt remedies that.
I also turned the squares to be facing different directions so not all the short or long sides would be facing the same way. I tied the quilt with a cotton yarn in the middle of each square.
I used the gray corduroy to make a border around the squares and then did another border of strips of jeans. I bound it with a charcoal gray fabric and backed it with a fun green print to brighten it up.
It measures 55" by 73".
I enjoyed making this quilt and it reminds me a lot of the last one I made with jeans. It also inspires me to maybe make a queen size jean quilt for the bed for winter. It would be a big project but it would be nice and warm. We'll see if I act on that inspiration or not. I still have curtains that need to be sewn.
