denimquilt

I have been intrigued with the idea of a denim quilt for a long time. I saved up old blue jeand and denim samples from faric books my wife got through her buisness. Recently, I decided it was time to try this. We needed a new "van quilt", i.e. something to keep in the van as a pad when moving sewing machines or Ann's harp, and also as a picnic quilt to throw on the ground when we go to the park. A denim quilt seemed like the perfect idea. I kept things very simple... squares with the color tones randomized. I used a wider seam than normal... 3/8", and ironed the seams open to keep things as flat as possible. I top stitched the seams down to help keep them lieing flat as I worked on the project. Here are some pictures of the finished top.

The full quilt top, which is 58: x 73". I'm really pleased with the color balance and shading. The extra dark denim I picked for the border really sets it off. This border will, unfortunately, be thinner than seen here, as it will fold over the back to provide the edge binding.

Close-up of the top stitching... to this point. When I put the backing on, I will "quilt" it by doubling each line of denim stitching, about 1/8" outside of what you see here. This will tack the backing down and increase the decorative effect of the top stitching. There will be no bat, as the quilt is plenty heavy enough!

Here is a close-up of the back of the top stitching. Note that I steam ironed the seams open and then top stitched to both sides. When I put the back on and double the lines of stitching, these seam edges will get a second set of stitches right at their edge to minimize fraying.

I learned some things about working with denim from this project. Jeans vary a lot in weight, so some fabrics are heavier than others. The whole quilt top is pretty heavy and somewhat stiff. If I were doing it again, I would work with the same size blocks, but instead of having 8 blocks X 10 blocks, I would use 6 x 8. With the border, that would be large enough for the intended use as a car and picnic quilt.

When using old jeans, do not use the knees. You can see right away which blocks were knees. I got a maximum of 14 blocks out of each pair of full size adult jeans. That includes knees. My jeans are large, so figure, skipping knees, a max of 10 blocks if you are buying jeans at garage sales or such. In the smaller size quilt, as above, that means that 5 pairs would make a quilt. I saw used jeans last weekend at $2 a pair.

I used 3/8" seams. I would have been better off to use 1/2" and provide a wider underside for my two lines of stitching.

I debated about whether to consider the fabric weave in the design and decided to ignore it, treating it as a visual variable. Bad decsion. Denim twill varies greatly in the amount of give horizontally vs. vertically. I would have been better off to be sure that the weave ran consistantly up and down, perhaps treating the denim weave angle stripes as a herringbone effect. The varying give to the long vertical rows made it hard to have my row ends come out dead even.

Also, the twill weave wants to encourage the fabric to "walk" a bit under the foot. Good hand control is vital.

With the seams ironed open, my Singer 201 treadle machine fed the fabric very evenly and I had no skipped stitches. However, when it came to putting the border on, the doubled seam thickness was flat on only one side of the seam. On the other, the foot wanted to slide off to the thinned side when it came to the doubled seams, and I ended up with some curves in my seam. I redid the worst ones, but it is something to watch for.

This was a lot of fun, and I am very pleased with the result. What I did, with the top stitching, is a lot more work than the chenille or frayed seam approach I had been thinking of, but I like it better, and so does Ann.

Dick Wightman

Once I had this top done, I realized it would be very heavy and I wanted to quilt it on my industrial Pfaff 134. However, this machine had been out of service for some time. I had run it on a Singer industrial treadle but had obtained a Pfaff treadle that needed rebuilding. The quilt project stopped while I finished the Pfaff treadle. (That project is detailed in The Wood Shop). Once the treadle was done and the 134 installed, I started quilting the denim quilt. I ran into some problems,

I decided on a red denim for the back. As noted above, my plan was to double the top stitching. I used a fusible bat rather than pinning. This didn't work out perfectly, as the denim was a bit heavy for the fusing to hold. When I did the quilting, I ended up with a nice pattern of crossing tracks on the back, but there was a fair amount of pucker... no foldovers, fortunately, but enough fabric movement to cause my layers to mis-align.

I had planned to bind the edges using the "fold front to back" method, so this was not the tradgedy it might appear. I had deliberately made the back the same size as the front, even though I knew I would be trimming off at least 2" for the foldover method. This allowed me to recover.

Above you see that very out of alignment bottom edge with the red back/bat trimmed in. I then trued the bottom blue edge, folded the outside blue edge in to the edge of the red, folded the blue over again, onto the red, and clipped this folde edge all around, mitering the corners.

Here are some pictures of the edge binding process. These may be of interest if you have wondered how to handle a large, heavy quilt when quilting. My procedure is to roll the work up and balance it over my shoulder.

Here are soem pictures of the finished quilt. It did not come out too badly, given the problems of working with something this heave and the fact that the fusing didn't take as well as it doesn on plain cotton. Overall, I definitely learned that two layers of batted denim are not as easy to work as a regular quilt. However, the project was fun, prompted me to clean and organize my sewing room and to finish the Pfaff treadle, and I have a good heavy van quilt out of it, so I'm happy.


Above you see shots of the top and back of the quilt. To the right and below are shots of the quilting detail. Note in the shot to the right how the original top stitching has been doubled. On the shots of the back, you can see how that set of seams was used as the quilting to join the bat and back to the top. I tried to keep the stitching looking as much like jeans stitching as I could... even to the reinforced corner stitching.