Quilt for Tracey, part 1

My beautiful niece, Tracey McDonald, visited recently and mentioned that she'd like a quilt. I recently received the gift of a box of fabrics and one of the pieces caught my eye, a dark green with butterflies. The butterflies are not prominent (they look like they are in the picture), so it's a nice subtle print. Of course, I always have denim. I recently purchased a Fat Cats rotary cutter ruler and thought that would make a great design for my animal-loving niece. Put that all together, and you have the trial block above. The plan is to create the rows, add 2" sashes across the bottom and top of each row, and then strip quilt the rows onto a piece of brown fleece that I have from an earlier project. Denim is fairly heavy, so having fleece as the batting and back combined eliminates a potentially very heavy quilt. I'm thinking it will be larger than lap sized, but not quite full bed sized. We'll wait and see on that.

Interestingly, I bought the ruler to create a larger Dresden Plate design with a scrappy look (using said box of fabric) and that's just going to have to wait. I'm inspired now!

One more thing to do with junk jeans! Coasters and mug mats.

Ever thrown away the seams and hems from blue jeans? I hate throwing away any part of an old pair of jeans. When I harvest the fabric, I have the zipper, waistband, and seams leftover. I give the back pockets to a friend who does projects with them, so they're not wasted. The zippers are sometimes saved and sometimes not. But those double seams! You would think there's something you could do with them. Well there is.

I was reading an article about uses for leftover denim and clicked this link - Polka Dot Pineapple: Recycling Fun  I've asked her permission to post a picture of her coaster to show you what it should look like, but in the meantime, here are a couple pictures the one I made, following the Polka Dot Pineapple blog instructions.

Mine has been machine washed. I wanted to test the fabric glue, and guess what? It was great. There is a little fray and I love it. I will definitely be making more.

I used this glue Aleen's Fabric Fusion glue pen. I got mine from Joann's, but it is sold many places online and off. The seams I used were from hems and the sides of jeans, as well as the seams from above the back pockets in the back. This particular coaster took two legs' worth of seams to make, so get to saving those seams!  I love when I can find a way to reuse denim. Though this is a no-sew project, it surely is a scrap stitching project!

What a great way to start the new year!

My harvested denim scraps are now separated into three piles - fabric, back pockets, and seams. What do YOU do with junk jeans?