Completed Picnic Blanket

I put a back on the jean quilt/picnic blanket that I sewed last week.  I'm so happy with how it looks.  

Now that it's done I figured I'd do a better description of how I sewed the quilt.  It's not a great tutorial, but it has pictures so its better :)  Some of this may sound familiar because it comes from my earlier post.  But keep reading because I added new stuff.

I've always wanted to make a quilt out of old jeans.  I've never done it because I wanted it to look amazing.  But I'm not an amazing quilter, in fact I'm not even much of a quilter.  So I always save my old jeans and then end up throwing them away in frustration when I dejunk my projects.    Two weeks ago I realized that if I made a jean quilt/picnic blanket then it didn't need to be amazing.  In fact the less work that went into it the better because then I wouldn't feel bad laying it down in the dirt/mud/grass/other things I don't want to sit on.

Because I'm not much of a quilter I didn't want to do a lot of piecing together so I made sure to cut the squares as big as possible.  I opened up the inseam of all the jeans and cut a big square from each pant leg.  I made a little template out of newspaper and used that to make sure they were all the same size.  I was able to get 12 squares that way.  The outside seam from the pants still showed, but I figured it would look like I'd spent the time to sew it that way.

Then I cut 16 rectangles from the top part of the pants - pockets included where possible.  (I'm really tall so my pants have a lot of material.)  I made sure to include a 5/8ths of an inch edge on one side so I could sew the rectangles together and have them be the same size as the squares.  I sewed those 16 rectangles together to make 8 more squares. (Miracle of miracles I was able to do this sewing while the girls watched.  Charlotte stood still and watched me intently.  Lydia crawled under the desk and tried to push the pedal at inopportune times.)

Then I laid out the 20 squares in a 4X5 pattern.  I alternated the direction of the fabric to create some visual/textural contrast.  I played around a lot with which squares went where.  Once I settled on a layout that I liked I sewed the squares into columns and then sewed the columns into a quilt. I did most of that sewing one night after the girls went to bed.  I didn't want them messing up my layout.  

So far I'd only had to sew 26 seams.  This is where I stopped for the week.  I wasn't sure if I wanted to put a back on the quilt.  I didn't want to have to go out and buy fabric that was just going to lay face down in the dirt.  But then I remembered that my friend Nanette had given me a whole bunch of fabric several months ago.  I wasn't sure, but I vaguely remembered a piece that would be the perfect back to a blanket destined to end up in the dirt.

I found the fabric and it was even better than I remembered it.  A picnic blanket is about the only thing I could ever see myself making with the fabric.  The pattern was so bold I was worried I would have a seizure while working with it.  It was also big enough to cover the whole back.  I had to put two seams in it, but the bold pattern makes them pretty much invisible.

I sewed the front to the back with my awesome Pfaff Hobby 1142 sewing machine.  It sewed through the heavy back material, and two layers of jean denim without a problem.  In some places it even went through 4 layers of denim without stopping.  I even tried out some of the decorative stitching and the machine didn't even flinch.  Yeah I love my sewing machine.

Lydia was awake while I sewed.  I kept her away from the machine by putting her in charge of putting my used pins back in the pin cushion.  She's a collector so this the perfect little job for her.  I couldn't sew fast enough to give pins as fast as she wanted them.

Then all that was left was to enjoy the blanket.  Derrick and Lydia put lots of chalk and dirt on the blanket right away.  I'd call that a success!