Once upon a time, I decided to make a denim quilt. I chose the overall size (twin). I chose the square size (6"). I chose the type of quilt (ragged edge).
Then I began cutting our old jeans apart.
Unless you've set out on this type of a quest yourself, you probably have no idea how many pairs of jeans it takes to make one quilt.
Truth is, I don't either. I lost track.
I tell you what, though. It takes more than you'd think. A lot more. Or, at least, it took a lot more than I thought it would. I cut apart every pair of old jeans we had, and I didn't even have half as many squares as I needed.
So I waited. And collected more worn-out jeans. And cut more squares. And saved them for when I'd have enough.
Fast forward to January 2009. I FINALLY had enough squares to start sewing things together. I picked out and bought flannel for the back of the quilt, cut all that into 6" squares, and began sewing. I zoomed through square after square, row after row. When everything was stitched together, I began snipping all the ragged edges so they would fray out.
As I sat on the couch in the family room, wearing calluses onto my hands from cutting through several layers of denim and flannel, Seth nonchalantly pointed out, "This one is coming apart."
I eyes swung from my task to where he had indicated. He was right. One of the seams was coming undone.
I carefully pinned it, thinking, "I'll fix that when I'm finished snipping."
Then I continued my work. To my horror, the anomaly Seth had pointed out was not, in fact, an anomaly. Several of my lines of stitches were coming undone.
I cried. It's true.
At that point, I decided to stop my snipping until all the necessary seams had been secured. Over the next several weeks (more like months, actually), I worked on sewing over those seams.
"How could this have happened?" I wondered. "Why are these all falling apart? What did I do wrong?!"
That's when I noticed the size of the stitches. They were huge. They were a size 5 stitch, which is supposed to be used only when basting fabric together.
I almost slapped my forehead. No wonder it was falling apart. How much of the quilt was sewn with a size 5 stitch? From all the work I had to do to fix it, I would guess about 80 percent.
So how did that happen? The 20 percent of squares that were sewn together with a size 2 stitch were all done correctly. How did the machine change stitch size?
I'm not going to point any fingers. But I will shamelessly post a picture:
After I looked over every seam and restitched the ones that needed it, I finally finished the snipping. Then I had to wash and dry the quilt, which, one Web site warned, could get very messy. I followed a suggestion and rubber-banded the end of a nylon stocking over the washing machine's drain tube to keep all the threads that would come loose from going into our septic system. Then I started the washer running and left.
Yes, the stitch size problem was totally not my fault. But I can't pin the blame on anyone else for leaving the washer unattended.
When I went back into the laundry room to pull the quilt out and put it in the dryer, I discovered a small lake on the floor. The nylon had done it's job--it stopped the threads from draining. Problem was, so many threads got caught in there that the water was forced out elsewhere.
It only took soaking four towels completely, emptying one huge bucket of water and letting the fan run for a full 24 hours to clean the mess up.
Whew. But it's finally done. And dang ... it looks pretty good.
And here's the fun thing about making a quilt from scraps: every piece has a history: (Click on it to see a larger version.)
