Use It Up, Wear It Out, Make It Do, Or Do Without - Quilts from Recycled Jeans

In making room for things in a closet at Mom's, we came across a huge stack of old jeans.  When I asked why they were there, I was told my sister was saving them to make quilts out of.  It seemed to me that stack had been there a LONG time.  One of the pairs of jeans was little boys size 6 and I'm pretty sure my nephew is 21 years old now and quite a bit bigger than size 6.

In any case, since Mom was planning to come up and stay for a couple of weeks I invited her to bring along those old jeans and make them into quilts at last.  She seemed agreeable, so in the time before she came to visit she cut the seams out of the jeans and removed the pockets.  At one time she had made a jeans quilt and left the pockets on.  It looked cute with the pockets, but apparently a trip to the beach filled those pockets up with sand, so we decided it was best to remove all pockets.

When I went to pick her up to bring her to our house, she had a laundry basket full of denim strips from the jeans and a variety of backings and batting.  I started right in sewing the strips together into longer strips and then used my rotary cutter to make them straight.

We made a variety of sizes, depending on the size of the backing we had.  Once I had enough strips sewn together we put it on the quilt frames where I left Mom to tie it while I went and sewed more strips together.

Mom was hoping we might get two...and maybe three done during her visit, but with the two of us working together, we ended up with seven quilts of various sizes!