Jeans, Jeans, Everything Jeans!

I love Jeans.

 I say, if I can, I would like to leave this world in a Sweatshirt and Jeans. My favorite clothes.

So its a fact, I have a lot of Jeans scraps. I hate to throw things out and would have probably become a Hoarder of the worst kind if not having to come to my parents home to care for my mom. I really had to downsize....and that is saying it mildly. At around the same time, I also came to a realization when I helped clean after my Aunt Lissie had passed, and found that it really isn't that necessary to keep all the butter containers you use just because you think you may need them in the future...and I was following that path...so immediately went home and disposed of all butter containers... :)

With that being said, when I sew, I do think its ok to keep some scraps you may use in a quilt or another project, as long as you can keep it contained or at a minimum or just organized.  So when I saw how many jeans my dear hubby would go thru, I thought wow, what if I could use these in some other ways somehow.. I mean there are just so many yard sales one person can have and clothes just never seem to sell that good at a yard sale for me.

I first made a jean quilt for my first grandson of jeans from my maternity jeans, my sons jeans and my dads jeans.

 I realized then I would love to make my own Jean quilt for my bed some day so that is when I started keeping any jeans we were done wearing and cutting them into quilting squares.  (After several years of this I finally have enough squares!!)

 But what do you do with the other parts of the jeans? I started keeping the zippers in one pile, and the waist bands in a pile and so on...

 


When I cut the jeans up I find that I want to make use of every possible piece or I feel I am just wasting the jeans when I could easily have donated them to someplace where another could use them . So by keeping those other parts, I have found ways to use them, like in the touchy feely book I made for Cayson, the zipper so he could learn to use it and the pockets for holding things he can feel or unsnap.



My mother used to braid area rugs or baskets with fabric scraps so I thought why not use some of the seams of the jeans or just other scraps that was left for this? So I have a pile of these also.  Here is what I have so far.

I decided to make an area rug of the waistbands.  At first I went for just a small size but now I think I will keep going with it because I love it. I also think it would also make a good cover for an ottoman. So many choices but I love how it turned out so far and I like keeping in the tags when possible.

 I also recently made a book cover for my Tablet.









I am not a cheap person but I just don't have the means to buy what is out there for a cover, so I just recycled a used notebook cover to glue the jean fabric onto.  I have lots of buttons for embellishments, and just got silly with it for fun. I like it, & its useful and I placed a large pocket in the back to hold a cloth to clean the screen or to put my hand in it to hold it up while playing a game (which I found useful as I play games at nite when I cannot sleep) I placed larger buttons on the front at top and bottom to hold a band to keep it closed if I ever take it out of the house on a trip.  (which I have not done since 2002, but Hey... ya never know)

So Jeans are a useful fabric in so many ways, if you are wondering what you can do with old jeans, and you like to sew or be creative in any way, get busy with jeans.

Once again, Thanks for stopping by!!

Olaf Blanket

It seems like my posts are becoming farther and farther apart.  I started the year thinking I was not going to slack off, and I got a good run for a few posts, but now it seems like months have passed since my last post. And I am not sure what happened.

Ok with that off my chest I wanted to show off the 2 blankets I sewed for 2 of my grandsons in 2014.  It seemed like Olaf from the Frozen movie was their choice of themes for Christmas that year and wanted all things Olaf.  So DIL was sure I could provide a couple of Olaf blankets. I don't know why she thought I was such a miracle worker.  But it became my mission to find Olaf Fabric. It was hard finding Olaf material that was worthy of a couple of winter blankets.  Most I found was either cotton, or flannel which was good for Pillow cases...

but I had my heart set on fleece. I had all but given up and was wondering around a supermarket of all places and there it was a OLAF No~Sew Blanket.  So very inexpensive also, I only paid $8.99 for each, I had to get 2. These boys are in a room together and close to age so for things such as this I usually get the same design. I alter each in some way so they each know which blanket is their own. I Loved this find as I always double layer my blankets, it makes them more warm and soft, and the boys seem to love that. So these No Sew Blankets are just the ticket as it takes all the decision making of what to use as a back layer out!  Yes I can be a lil bit lazy....Or you could say I just try to make it as easy as possible.

I usually try to make my own binding so that was all I needed to do and to then sew the front and back together. I have lots of scraps and lots of jean scraps. I decided to make my binding out of jeans. I had blue jeans for one boy and black jeans for the other this way they know which blanket is their blanket.

There are tutorials all over the internet so I won't go into that here but its really simple once you get the hang of it or find a simple tutorial.  You can easily buy binding, and I have but I like to make blankets and quilts and since this was a no sew blanket I wanted to make it my own as much as possible.

I think they came out fine.  The white lines on the side where you are supposed to "cut" and tie since it was supposed to be a No Sew Blanket, I think worked out ok, boys don't know that, just looks like its a design element. :)

~~Thanks for stopping by~~