Sisterhood
April 2022

For this recently completed jeans quilt, I used my and my sister Cathi’s old worn jeans. I had been wanting to make a jeans quilt for some time, but hadn’t found any designs that interested me. I had seen one that was made similar to this, except the folded over piece had been radiused, resembling a cathedral block. I wanted a more modern look so left the folded piece squared off, and mitered the corners. Since the back, or inside, of used jeans can be quite plain looking, I used Annie’s Craft Store’s Magical Winter 5″ charm squares on the inside of the jeans fabric, under my folded over piece, and then topstitched the folded over piece using a decorative stitch.

I constructed the quilt by starting with 7″ squares cut from the legs of the jeans. For most of the jeans I had, 7″ was about the widest I could get making the most efficient use of the fabric. I then cut a 1″ square from each corner of the 7″ squares. I first joined the squares to create my rows, using a 1″ straight seam, sewing from cut corner to cut corner. Next, I attached the 5″ charms using temporary quilters spray adhesive. Once I had a row assembled, I would seam down the flap portion just along the edges that had already been sewn, using a decorative stitch.

When it came time to join the rows, I opted to create two panels since jeans fabric is heavy, as it made it much easier to manipulate through my machine when it came time to do the final stitching down of the folded over piece between each row. I mitered the corners as I worked down each seam stitching down the folded over pieces. I used one of my machine’s fancy embroidery stitches, hoping to allow the raw edges to fray some, but not too much. Once it was done, I ran it through the wash to begin the fraying process. Overall, I was quite happy with how this one turned out, and I think Cathi would have liked it too!

I had originally planned to donate this quilt, but have been having a difficult time this year in finding a location in my county to drop them off for the kids in foster care. As the year ticked by, and many attempts at reaching out to Family Services for the county met with no response, I decided perhaps it was the cosmos’ way of telling me that this quilt was not intended for donation, but instead, for my eldest sister Lynn. I gifted it to her for Christmas, and she was very touched — Sisterhood ❤