Saturday, January 27, 2007

Old Jeans' New Identity

I've been having a clean out, and I found 7 pairs of old jeans to chuck out (fat jeans!!). But instead of popping them in the St Vinnies bin I decided to have a go at making a small raggy quilt. Raggy being when you keep the seams outwards, then clip them every 1/4 inch, then wash it and then bung it in the dryer to make the clipped seams go all sort of fluffy and raggy.



The icons on the quilt are loosely taken from spell icons from an online game called World Of Warcraft. It's what my son loves to play, and as the quilt is for him I had the urge to jazz it up just a touch. It's ended up being a lap quilt, I was going to make it bigger, but have you any idea how heavy a denim quilt is!! It has no wadding, it's just backed with a striped cotton fabric and it is HEAVY. Still, I quite like it, and I think denim is a good boy quilt.


Boy you have to keep an eye on things when you wash it though. I wandered into the laundry to find the washing machine having a nervous breakdown, fifty trillion little tiny denim threads had blocked the plughole of the laundry trough and were stopping the washing machine from emptying. Supervision was necessary, I had to keep hauling out handfuls of threads from the trough each time the machine did a spin. Then the washing machine spat the dummy completely and refused to function. At that point I had to don my repairlady hat and empty the filter down in the bowels of the machine. It was chockerblock full of threads, and one other strange and mysterious item....


Hmm. Considering there are only grown-ups (well, sort of) in this house, I'm not sure where a gun the size of a matchbox has appeared from. Perhaps we have commando house pixies...

Anyway, with the washing machine de-linted and de-gunned, I popped the quilt into the dryer where it is recommended that you empty the lint filter every twenty minutes. Actually I found that there was very little in the dryer filter, it appears my washing machine did a very good job of sucking all the loose threads from the quilt.

And on a different note, look what my darling husband whipped up tonight...
TWO apple and rhubarb pies! mmmmmm
Steve is a brilliant pastry maker whereas I am crap. So he wears the official pastry chef hat in this house, and I make the custard.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

hey, it looks great, i have been working on blocks for a rag quilt for sometime but have not sewn it together yet. that is my next quilt project to finish. tks for the tip about the lint.

Fel said...

The pies look lovely! Mhhhh!

And the quilt does too. How fun that you actually put some WoW symbols on it. I don't think there are many parents out there supporting their children's gaming habits. ;D

aykayem said...

mmmmm Rhubarb pies ... now I am hungry!
That toy gun would make a wonderful embellishmeht on a crazy quilt ... maybe with a few blanket stitch bullet holes nearby and/or some other military do dads of some sort or another ...
(come to think of it - that mushy blue stuff would be an interesting embellishment on something art quilty too ... and you said you were weird? - I think I am weirder ;-)
I like the jeans quilt too - now you have inspired me to dig out some of the huge pile of old blue jeans I have in a box somewhere, and do something similar ... I think I like the raggy denim better than those other raggy flannel baby/etc quilts!
btw - love your cretan stitch branches accros the swamp (in the next post after this one) ... I wonder if an orc or something will pop up out of that wonderful murky green water?
Andrea,
disorganised in Dunlop
(who also likes doing buttonhole stitches "outwards" ;-)