Blue Jean Quilt

The other day a How-to-quilt had send an instruction for making a jeans quilt and this was kind of an interesting of sort of jeans quilt. Most quilts I’ve seen may have jeans or ride clothes where you just take the jean material cut into squares sewn together in then fringed the seams so that you have a ride type of quilt. This one was made out of circles. And it uses both jeans and material from shirts or skirts or aprons or any other kind of scrap material in the center.

Ultimately it looks like a Cathedral windows and the good news is you do the entire thing on your sewing machine. So, it goes together quickly, you can put bag in it or not but it’s easy to sew. So, I thought I would show you today. I’m not going to sew the entire of quilt together but I’ll show you how to sew a few of the patches together so that you can make this kind of a quilt.

So, let’s go over to the cutting table. A friend of mine give me this giant blocks full of squares that they have been cut from jean and they are all different kinds of shapes. So, I though this would be perfect for this particular project where I can cut them into circles.

The first thing I needed to do is decide what size of circle I wanted to make and then cut them. And this old tool, this omniarch tool is the easiest way I know to get your perfect kind of a circle. You can use it to cut but I think cutting jeans using this template is going to be too difficult. So, what I’m going to do is use the template to mark the jeans fabric and I’ll cut it with a scissors.

So, the first thing I need to do is fold it in a quarters and I’m not going to pay too much attention to this straight grid and cross grid on the fabric. I’m just folding it. And then I need to put my ruler on top. And the way this is going to work is that may fold that edges are going to go in to this corner here and I’m going to mark on the outside. And because this square is pretty much the same size as the edge here on both sides, all I can do is mark in the center just the curve. And then I can kind of straighten it up with my scissors.

So, I have this little mechanical chalk that I’ve really like and it turns out that it just fits into the curve of this omniarch. It’s just pretty convenient, so I’m going to line it up and I’m going to push it fairly hard. And then I can just put this down into the slot and mark it. When I lift it up I’ve got the white chalk which I can easily see. And then I just pick up my piece here and curve it around.

The next thing I need to do is figure out what’s size of the square can fit on the inside of this circle. You can have any size square inside that you’ve want. I mean, you can make that shorter if you want but the idea is to get your corners, the corner of your squares so that it’s right at the edge of the circle. And so fortunately, I have a four inches square here and the other way to mark this is to take my ruler, wind it up and then use a black pencil which will probably be a little bit better.

So, once I have all my circles marked, then I’m going to start looking at this fabric. So, the first thing I want to do with my fabric here is make sure that I have that some kind of a square corner. So, I’m just going to take this ruler, I could take really any ruler and just trim off the edge of this piece of pile fabric. This is actually four pieces and I’m just going to trim it off so it looks even. And I’m going to trim off this side as well.

So, that I have two even sides. Now that I’ve got the two sides of this fabrics squared off, I can take my square of put it, line it up with the two sides that I’ve just squared off. And then trim the rest of this fabric. And then I got this pieces which are fit inside the circle. Now, that I have the squares cut and the circles cut and marked I’m ready to sew them together. So, I’ve got them right sides together and I’m just going to stitch straight down. Now, I have got the first pair and I’m just going to add the second pair on. Just like regular chain stitching and there is going to be overlap here so we’re going to have pick up the presser foot and help guide this through but you just keep adding one.

Now you can sew however many you want together but I’m just going to sew this two together and open them up. So, that the wrong sides are facing up and then I may fold this like together like that and line them up. And then the seams that I have sewed, what I want to do is avoid sewing over that it seam anyway. But to help it got through the machine, I’ll open it up and then stick a pin on both sides so that I can sew that these are top and bottom folded open.

Now I’ve these lined up and I’m just going to stitch all the way through. So, I’ll follow this line which you can barely see but it’s that white chalk line so I go down this one, cross over here where these two seams come together and sew down the next pair of circles. Now, you can begin to see how this looks. I have seen these circles together and then open them up. So, then what I do is I’m just going to take this piece of fabric and put in the center here. Once you have your squares at the fabric inside. Chalk the way, then you’re going to fold your jeans sides down again then I have put pins there and that will hold the fabric and the jeans in place. And then you’re just going to zigzag.

You’re probably going to want to play around a little bit with the length of your zigzag stitch and how far those stitches are apart. What you’re going to do is just zigzag and I would try to make the right side of the stitch cover up the row edge of your jeans. And then when you get to the center what I would do is stitch down this side of the curve. So, that way you don’t have to worry about back stitching here. You’ll have it covered; you can just go straight down. And then you can come turn around and go back the other side and down to the other side securing both sides of these flaps. So, half of these are done, needs to redone. And then the bottom two are done. And you can see this is not perfect. This is a little bit shorter in that one. So, now I’m just going to sew down in the other sides, the cross sides doing exactly the same thing.

Now you are ready to add more on to the sides and you can sew this together however you’d like. You can do four like I did which is pretty simple or you could sew eight of them together or however it works out. And when you get to the edge of your quilt then you can just fold that down and zigzag around the outside. So, you don’t have to put any binding knot. If you want it too and you could cut it all off so that it’s straight and then put a binding around the outside. But I think this is would be a kind of fun it’s just to have an easy to do is just to zigzag.

Keep in mind it’s a jeans quilt it’s not going to be, it probably, it will be rough for a long time even if the center fabric where its out, you still look at the jeans b fabric. So, it’s going to be very durable and pretty fun. Happy quilting.