Thursday 21 July 2011

Denim Quilting- it's the new fun alternative to employment!

My agency suck, the job listings are as bare as a week old elephant carcass, and I keep getting rejection emails for everything I apply for. But not to worry, there's plenty here to keep me occupied. For example, do you know what 150 five and a half inch denim squares look like?


You do now! They also leave a lovely trail of denim lint throughout the house from their fraying edges. I wanted to create a quilt with some sort of order, so in a badly lit room I sorted the squares into piles of similar tone.




Then I suddenly realised I didn't have a good grasp of how big this stupid thing was going to be before seam allowances, so I laid out 10 x 15 squares and made a cross in the not-middle for reasons I can't remember.


Armed with a vague idea of what was going on, I made a little colour charty thing and drew up several ideas before settling on this one.


A pretty blurry blobby thing, fading from grey and black squares through all the way to the lightest bleached ones in the centre. Or that was the idea anyway. I decided to film myself laying out the quilt, probably as a form of procrastination. When you're unemployed, it's good to make life difficult for yourself, say by wrestling a tripod for 10 minutes, because there's not much else to do.









I turned our front room into a workshop because my bedroom, as usual, looks like a bomb went off. It meant I had to balance my sewing machine on a tiny table instead of my huge black desk, but the set up worked. The cat came to help.




I started by sewing the squares into 2x2 blocks and then into rows, pressing as I went with a hot iron. The denim was a bitch to press because women's jeans have elastane in them to give you "dat ass" and the iron and pins would stretch the fabric all out of shape.




See how much the seam allowances made it shrink? I used 1/2inch allowances, so each square ended up 4.5 inches from the original 5.5. The other cat came to help.


Her nickname is Monster Cat and judging by the fact it's impossible to take a non blurry photo of her, I feel she may be some kind of demon. Oh and those of you wondering how I tell my black cats apart- YOU ARE CAT RACIST. Also we put a collar on Zero. But you're still a cat racist and I can tell them apart without the collar.


Tomorrow I'm sewing the rows together so the preliminary top piecing will all be done. I'm kind of dreading it because accuracy is so important and the mix of stretch and non stretch jeans, (and some pieces have been cut on the bias) has skewed everything a little. From what I can see laying it out, it looks good but some seam lines just won't line up perfectly.


Well, whatever, it's kept my idle hands occupied for a while.




P.S Yesterday I got my 500th view, hooray! I really enjoy writing all this junk, so it's nice to know people are seeing it.
Oh and you may not have noticed, but there is a new page up top, next to where it says "Questions?" called "Support!". I would be very grateful if you clicked it.

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