How to Sew an Easy Strip Quilt

This tutorial was originally posted on Crafting a Green World.

Denim quilts are about the warmest, snuggliest quilts you'll ever nap under. They're comfortingly heavy like those weighted blankets that people love--so heavy, in fact, that you'll find you can skip the batting altogether when you're making a denim quilt! 

Denim quilts also tend to be super soft, since they're most often made from well-loved and well-worn blue jeans. They tend towards all cotton, so that's a plus for those of us who prefer natural fabrics. And if you put it out into the world that you'd like to have some old jeans to craft with, old jeans WILL come to you--I have relatives I don't even remember who call every now and then to ask me if I want their old jeans! What an awesome way to save on new material AND save some great aunty once-removed from tossing her ripped jeans in the dumpster! 

You can make some marvelous quilt creations from this upcycled denim, but my favorite type of denim quilt is also the easiest: a strip quilt is super quick to create, and when you sew it entirely from upcycled denim, you can achieve a really cool ombre effect.

Supplies & Tools

To make your own strip quilt out of upcycled denim, you will need:

• Blue jeans. Using a random collection of gifted jeans will generally result in a good variety of blue tones, perfect for making an ombre quilt. I tend to break down my jeans for crafting and storage, and for this project, I use just the jeans' legs. Save those back pockets, zippers, and bulky seams for other projects!
• Cutting/measuring supplies. You'll want a self-healing cutting mat, a meter stick, chalk, and scissors or a rotary cutter.
• Sewing machine with jeans needle. My sewing machine does NOT love sewing denim. One thing that I do to make it easier on my machinery is install a sharp jeans/denim sewing needle, one designed specifically for helping home sewing machines muscle through all that thick cotton.
• Flannel fabric matching your quilt top's dimensions. To keep this quilt quick and easy and not too hard on my poor old sewing machine, I am NOT binding it--gasp, I know! This means that the backing fabric just needs to match the dimensions of the quilt top.

Directions

1. Do the Math To make your own quilt top, you first have to make some decisions:

• What size do you want your quilt to be? I, for instance, am sewing two quilts that will match the dimensions of a Twin XL mattress, and one quilt that will match the dimensions of a king mattress.
• What seam allowance do you want to use? I'm using 1/2."
• What width do you want your strips to be? They can be any width, as long as it's uniform.
• Add double the seam allowance to your strip width to find the total width that you should cut each denim strip.

2. Cut the Denim Strips 

 As long as your strips are the same width, each one can be a different length--in fact, it adds to the fun of making a strip quilt to have a lot of strips of different lengths! You can also decide if you want to cut your strips so as to avoid worn knees or holes, or if you want to keep them. I'm cutting out grass stains and giant rips, but I'm actually keeping a few worn spots in my denim strips. It's not hard to tack a small hole so that it doesn't continue to unravel, and it adds character to the quilt.

3. Begin Piecing the Quilt's Rows 

 Because I want an ombre quilt, I first arranged my denim strips into light, medium, and dark piles, each of which will take up an approximate third of the quilt. You can arrange your tones anyway you like, or make it random! Sew denim strips together at the short sides until their length matches the desired width of your quilt, ironing each seam open. Piece together another row out of strips, then sew the two rows together, again ironing the seam open. You can continue to sew each row onto the quilt as you make it, or sew all of your rows individually before piecing them into the quilt top. My sewing machines hates sewing thick fabrics and therefore sometimes feeds unevenly, so I also have a little trick: I cut each of my denim rows too long. I line them up carefully at one side, but I don't bother to trim the other side until my quilt top is finished. At that point, I can trim it to size and it looks as if I had everything matched perfectly from the beginning! 

4. Pin the Quilt Top to the Backing 

 Iron the quilt top and the backing fabric. Lay the backing fabric right side up, then place the quilt top, right side down, on top of it. If you have trouble keeping the backing fabric taut and smooth while adjusting the quilt top, consider that I sometimes will literally tape the backing fabric to my floor with masking tape while I'm working with it. 

 It does not help when the cat decides that the quilt top is his personal playscape and takes a running dive at it with his claws out, but it helps in other, non-cat scenarios. 

  5. Sew the Quilt Top to the Backing 

 Use a 1/2" seam allowance to sew around the perimeter of the quilt, leaving an opening in one short side, about a third of its length, unsewn. Turn the quilt right side out through the opening (this is also known as binding a quilt "pillowcase style"), then iron the seams to set them. Fold the raw edges of the opening to the inside, and iron to crease them. 

  6. Edgestitch and Tie Your Quilt 

 You don't have to edgestitch around your entire quilt, but you do need to edgestitch that opening closed, and so if your sewing machine can possibly stand it, it does look nice to edgestitch it all the way around. 

 Technically, we're not making a quilt but a tied blanket here, since instead of quilting it, you're going to use embroidery floss to knot together the quilt top and backing at intervals. Here's the detailed tutorial for how to tie a quilt. 

 What you've got now is a very warm, very soft, VERY heavy denim and flannel quilt. Whether its made from your partner's (or your great aunty's!) beloved jeans, or simply old jeans that you've scored from the thrift store, it's gone from trash to an heirloom, thanks to you! Now go throw it down in some quiet field tonight, and lie on it and look at the stars. You deserve it!

It Only Took Me Two Years to Make This Diagonal Denim Strip Quilt

 Because I get distracted...

I get so habitually distracted that one of my New Year tasks is to look through last year's planner and transfer all of my WIPs from the previous year to a new list in the front of my new planner. This year's WIP list holds 21 items, which... that's a lot of projects to have started and not finished...

But but BUT that list actually used to have TWENTY-THREE items, but I did finally update the kids' Girl Scout vests with their new badges and patches AND I finally made the broken dish pendant I'd been wanting.

Of course, Will's Girl Scout vest already needs another new badge sewn onto it, but whatever. Instead, let's focus on THIS awesome project that I knocked off my list this month!

Not gonna lie: I started this quilt for Syd, and this quilt for Will, AND a still-unfinished quilt for my bed two years ago, thinking that I'd give myself just loads and loads and loads of time to piddle my way through them by Christmas. I like to give everyone a cozy present on Christmas Eve, and homemade denim quilts would fit the bill just fine!

Yeah... no. I gave everyone giant fuzzy slippers instead. And THIS Christmas Eve I gave them all STORE-BOUGHT fuzzy blankets, gasp! I even had Will's quilt already completed by that time, but Syd's was still a pile of denim and flannel. 

Finally I decided that the quilts would make a cozy Valentine's Day present for the kids, so I buckled down and spent most of a day basically making Syd's quilt from start to finish:

For Will's quilt, I'd done horizontal rows, and I'd tried for an ombre effect, but I don't really love it. For Syd's quilt, I tried diagonal rows, and I love it so much that I feel a little guilty that Will's quilt isn't so good, yikes:

In case you ever come over to my house and wonder why I have literal masking tape on my literal family room floor, it's so that I can lay out a quilt whenever I want. I am literally just that classy!

And as always, back-to-front binding is THE way to go:

I am so pleased with how this quilt came out!

It's super cozy and warm, it's comfortingly heavy, it was dead easy to make because it doesn't even require batting, and because the entire top is upcycled jeans, the only costs were for the flannel backing, the thread, and the approximately one zillion jeans needles I broke sewing over those one zillion seams:

I'd say that diagonal rows are now my go-to denim quilt design, but the quilt that I'm planning for my bed is going to be a square, and I'm currently obsessed with the idea of sewing it in a log cabin design.

Maybe I'll even have it finished in time to show it to you within the next couple of years!

How to Make an Upcycled Denim Slipcover for a Couch

I originally published this tutorial on Crafting a Green World.

Our couch is horrible.

It's got good bones, I guess. I mean, isn't that what you're supposed to say about a couch that you bought used 15 years ago and brought into a house with toddlers, knowing that before you bought it the couch lived in the lounge of a freshman dorm for who knows how long previously, and the darn thing is still standing?

It's still standing, but it looks horrible. Like, really, really horrible, in a way that even I, the queen of Lived-In Chic, am embarrassed about whenever people visit and I have to expose them to the horror of its appearance.

But here's the thing: a couch that looks horrible? That is SO fixable. Just throw a slipcover over that little monster and go on with your life! And if you don't have a slipcover? It is SO easy to sew one from scratch!

The key to this DIY slipcover project is lots and lots of upcycled denim. Fortunately, old denim is easy to come by--as soon as I announced this project, I had family and friends and people I didn't even know practically throwing their old blue jeans and denim shorts and jean skirts at my head.

I finally had to start saying a flat-out no to anyone who tried to hand me a bag of clothes (even then, sometimes I'd wake up to find a bag on my porch), and I've still got enough to slipcover all three sections of my horrible couch and probably make my entire family warm, heavy denim quilts this winter, as well--stay tuned!

Tools & Supplies

Here's what else you'll need to make this upcycled denim slipcover for your couch:

• Large-format pattern paper. Newspapers work well for this. If your paper isn't large enough, tape additional pieces to it until it is.
• Cutting and measuring tools. I work with a fabric tape measure, ruler, self-healing cutting mat, rotary cutter, and fabric scissors.
• Sewing machine with a denim needle and heavy-duty thread. For extra security, you can use the thread that's designed specifically for denim.

Directions

Grab your tools, and let's get sewing up that ugly couch!

1. Measure And Piece Together The Big Rectangle

Your couch definitely has a big rectangle. Maybe it's the back, or maybe, like mine, you'll get a whole straight section running from the bottom in front, up to the seat and across, up to the back and over, and down the back to the floor. Thanks to that big rectangle, the only slipcover pieces that I need to sew are the big rectangle and two matching side pieces.

To measure this big rectangle, here's where your fabric tape measure comes in handy. My couch is 45" across, and using my fabric tape measure I could measure everything from the bottom front to the bottom back as one continuous length of 92".

Add a couple of inches to each measurement for a seam allowance, and go piece together a GIANT denim rectangle!

To actually piece together that big rectangle, simply start squaring off pieces of denim and sewing them together. The goal is to create a piece that's larger than the required dimension so that you can square again, if necessary, and trim it down to size. Pretend that you're making a crazy quilt; the nice thing about using denim is that everything is basically the same colorway, so it'll all go reasonably well together.

And yes, feel free to include pockets and embellishments! Keep metal pieces off of this big rectangle, because you don't know yet what part will be the seat and what part the backrest, but in a minute when we do the sides of the slipcover, then even grommets and zippers are fine.

When you've got your big rectangle finished, drape it over the couch and, if necessary, trim it further.

2. Make A Pattern For The Slipcover's Side Pieces

Tape together newspaper or large-format paper until you have a piece that's larger than the side of your couch.

Line up the bottom of the paper with the floor, and hold the paper against the side of the couch.

Trace the edges of the couch onto the paper. When you've got the outline, lay it flat on the floor and use a straightedge and a french curve to help you neaten the lines. You can also add an inch of seam allowance.

Cut out the pattern piece and hold it up to the couch again to double-check it. Redraw or trim as necessary.

3. Trace And Piece Together The Slipcover's Side Pieces

Again, your goal is to piece together denim that is larger than the pattern piece, then trim it to size. I don't know who gave me their old denim skirt, but I was STOKED to see that when I cut it in half and cut out the zipper and waistband, it was still enough fabric to make one entire side panel of my slipcover! Yay!

Conversely, I did a LOT of piecing for the second side panel. Don't forget that those large pieces of denim are nice to work with, but using up small pieces and scraps is just as important when you're trying to save as much material as possible from the waste stream. In the photo below, I pieced my trimmings from the big rectangle to the panel, then traced the pattern piece directly onto it and cut away the extra. As a note, I seriously overestimated the dimensions because I was paranoid, and it's easier to trim away than to add more fabric!

I did the same trick of piecing together a section made of small scraps, sewing it to the panel, and tracing the pattern to trim the excess to make this backrest section. Since the section that I was adding was pretty small, I dove deep and used up some pretty small scraps to piece it:

4. Sew The Slipcover Panels Together

When you have the big rectangle and both side panels complete, you can sew them together. Double-check your work first by placing everything on the couch and checking its fit; when I did this, I discovered that I should cut a couple more inches off the width of my big rectangle. I don't know if I accidentally added my seam allowance twice, or was just, again, overly generous with my measuring. Regardless, the slipcover looks much nicer when it's clearly well-fitted!

I'll be frank: this is NOT the cutest thing that I've ever sewn. Patchwork denim furniture is not one of the goalposts of my interior design aesthetic. But you know what? I don't have it in my budget to buy a brand-new couch this year, nor do I have the desire to trash a perfectly decent piece of furniture that is still super comfy and only looks like garbage. This upcycled denim is just as sturdy as upholstery fabric (with NO flame retardants!), and, as I've already discovered, when a kid leaves an uncapped Sharpie lying on it, it's just as easy to patch as a pair of blue jeans.

Besides, the worn denim has made that couch even more impossibly comfortable, and the whole thing doesn't look half bad when it's covered in throw pillows and kittens and happy kids.

Heart Handmade: Some WIPs

Are you as stoked to ride the bus as my babies are? No? Well, then it probably wasn't as hell of a morning for you as it was for my babies, cause it was a hell of a morning for the babies this morning. Of course, we ride the bus something like every other day, so it's often a hell of a morning for them. Kids, you know?

And last night, my first night teaching for the semester, Matt made this for dinner:

It's going to be a hell of a semester, I can tell.

When I haven't been pre-screening Gone with the Wind or answering stupid questions ("Do we really need to buy ALL of the required textbooks for this class?"), I've been happily crafting away to a Valentine theme. After having monopolized our big living room table for nearly a week (carpet picnic, anyone?), I've finally finished the papercrafting portion of my Valentine's Classroom Card Exhange swap over at Craftster. Here are a couple of little peekies:

Next comes the beadwork and the adding of Christmas clearance tinsel, and after that comes the making of envelopes from old magazine pages. And then I send them. And then, in return, I get 23 lovingly crafted handmade Valentines from all my swap buddies--squeal!

One of the fun things I've been anticipating about this project is trying out some beadwork with some of the absolutely terrific vintage beads I scored at a garage sale last summer. I bought most of them intending to sell them on etsy, but really they need a more positive identification of provenance and material, so while I'm waiting for the library to buy me , I'm setting aside a few that I'd like to try crafting with myself, primarily ones with less traditional bead shapes that I can dangle as pendants from my soldering work, like these hearts:Resin? Lucite? Beats me. They rock, though, right?

This afternoon while the girls carefully picked out every single dried blueberry from the peanut butter and dried blueberry sandwiches I'd made them (you see why I need a creative outlet?) I finished cutting out the pieces for the two denim quilts with heart appliques that I'm planning--I was doing this a couple of weeks ago, but had to set it aside when I ran out of denim, and last week at the Recycling Center I actually had a pair of denim overalls in my hands, when some guy, I swear to god, walked up to me, took them out of my hands, walked back to his truck, threw them in the back, then got in himself and drove away. I called Matt right there on the sidewalk, totally incoherent with fury, and like a man he's all, "What are you talking about? Why do you want overalls?" Barf.

Anyway, here are some of the heart appliques we're decorating for our lap quilt for the living room:

And seriously, that's not even all of the heart-y goodness! The scrappy heart pinbacks that I put up in my etsy shop made some people happy (and therefore me, as well), so I've been making more. These use some old songbook pages, and I take unmitigated pleasure in putting a definitive sequence of notes on each pin:

I've been so addicted that I inadvertently passed on my addiction to my girls, and they have spent so long painstakingly choosing the exact one-inch circle punched from scrapbook paper and the exact tiny heart punched from a different scrapbook paper for each of a thousand pins each and then "helping" me make their buttons--

--that I've been spending much of that time patiently assisting them and also kind of screaming inside my head.

But it is through these kinds of sacrifices that a future generation of crafty divas is trained.

P.S. Check out my post about how much I heart Craftster over at Crafting a Green World.

Back in the Saddle

It feels good to be back in the swing of things, still home recently enough that daily life doesn't yet seem like drudgery. After all, I've been able to CRAFT again! I put aside schlogging away at my Ravenclaw house scarf until booth-sitting at my next craft fair, and made some real recycled crafts in the last couple of days. I finally thought of a use for some little panels my mother cross-stitched on recycled denim:

And since it's nearly the end of summer (sigh), I'm running low on my wool sweater collection, so I sewed up a few of these babies out of pretty much my last big pieces of felted wool: Do you recognize this doll as the handknit Ecuadorian sweater I scored at my Goodwill Outlet expedition?

The girls seem to have settled back into the routine here pretty well, too, which is nice, since they were starting to get pretty crazy those last couple of days in California. We went to the library for Say it in Spanish with Miss Nancy, a superstar who can breastfeed baby Mateo while singing and playing her folk guitar, and we checked out the following items:

• Eyewitness: OceanDVD
• Born to AddCD
• Echoes of Nature: Ocean Waves CD (I think it has an actual recording of the waves at Pebble Beach!)
• Reading Rainbow Seashore Surprises computer program
• Zoe's Hats: A Book of Colors and Patterns
• Lemons Are Not Red (Ala Notable Book(Awards)) (Neal Porter Books)
• Fish Clip Art CD-Rom
• Colors in Nature: Yellow
• Triceratops Gets Lost book and CD
• A Busy Day for Stegosaurus book and CD
• Velociraptor: Small and Speedy book and CD
• An Alphabet Of Dinosaurs
• Orange by Sarah L. Schuette
• Seashells by Adele Richardson

Can you tell what the girls are interested in this week?

After school I wanted to engage the girls in an art project so I could clean, but nothing I suggested (decorating paper bags to use at my craft fairs, painting on butcher paper, drawing pictures on cardstock for thank-you notes, etc.) struck their fancies, so I ended up printing out dinosaur coloring pages from Geoparent. Filling in coloring pages is a really lousy art activity, but it can be a pretty good activity for other learning objectives--map work, absorbing how different dinosaurs look, associating words with letters, etc.

And then I cleaned, and then we went to the post office to mail an etsy package, and then we went to Goodwill, and then we got pizza, and then we watched our ocean documentary, and now Matt is putting the girls to bed while I gear myself up for putting my textbook order in at the IU Bookstore. I really should get on it, because school starts in, you know, two weeks. But it is a loathesome activity, and now I think I will put it off until tomorrow.

What activities do you find loathesome?

Craft for My Kids Conclusion

The Craft for My Kids Swap is OVER, at least on the giving end. Being as my partner just, you know, gave birth and all, I reckon I can wait patiently to receive my goodies. Here's the swap gallery in which my partner very generously compliments my crafts, and here are my photos of what I made:
My partner's nursery is decorated in blue and sage, so this denim quilt has a sage wool felt backing and binding and is tied with an embroidery thread that sort of, but doesn't quite, match the backing:



I made this baby powder by sieving cornstarch over and over with lavender essential oil. It smells so excellently awesome that I wish I had an excuse to, um, powder myself...I used some different essential oils in these vegetable glycerin soaps. Lavender is calming and soothing on the skin, peppermint is energizing and helps upset tummies, and lemon-eucalyptus clears up stuffy noses: I think babywearing is critical to attachment parenting, which I think is critical to raising calm, confident, creative, and self-actualized people. I make a lot of these ring slings, and I teach babywearing locally at Barefoot Herbs+Barefoot Kids, so I felt very comfortable making a ring sling for my partner, but I still wanted to weight-test it, of course. Yeah, I think it will hold a newborn...One of my partner's kiddos loves turtles, so I wanted to make a turtle stuffed animal out of felted wool, but I never ended up totally happy with the pattern. I've got some more ideas, though, so I'm going to keep sussing it out:

I've made so many of these crayons in the past year that, seriously, the girls are running out of crayons. Is it still a recycled craft if you have to buy your kids new stuff so you can craft with their old stuff?This is my most favorite thing ever--I made my partner four of these, in different colors. These are made out of old T-shirts, y'all!I like to make kiddos doll ring slings to match their mommas' slings. Only Sydney uses them to carry actual baby dolls, though. Willow is more partial to hauling dinosaurs...On the whole, this swap was a huge success, and I haven't even received my own package of goodies! I learned some terrific new skills that are already serving me well, which is one of the big reasons why I love these swaps, and I developed some great new ideas for new products for my web shop and craft fairs. The essential oils soaps went over really well at their first fair last weekend, and I'll be bringing out the tie-dyed T-shirt bibs really soon. The felted wool turtle still needs some work, but I think it has potential.

I spent a little time today making black bias tape to frame up a tie-dye quilt I pieced, but most of the day was spent running a child-labor fruit salad sweatshop in my kitchen in preparation for Willow's school birthday party this afternoon. Willow's teacher, who is some kind of preschool evil genius, has a beautiful birthday celebration for her students. At circle time each birthday child gives a proper introduction of their family to the rest of the group--"This is my momma, Julie, and my daddy, Matt, and my baby sister, Synee"--and a large model of the sun is placed in the center of the ellipse on which the children sit. When it's your child's turn, she holds the large model of the earth and walks around the ellipse as many times as the earth has been around the sun since she's been born, while a parent reads a brief biography of the child, prepared earlier with the child's help. Willow was insistent that I mention she'd been to France as a baby, for instance. After every birthday child has had their turn, all the birthday children stand in the center of the ellipse while the teachers and their schoolmates sing the "Tall as a Tree" song to them. Reader, did I weep? Oh, freakin' yeah, I did.