Legacy jeans quilt

It's been the most glorious weekend, weather-wise and life-wise. It seems England has actually decided to have a summer - and on Wimbledon weekend too. The gods are definitely feeling extra kind this year.

I spent my weekend alternating between the garden and my sewing. The garden is starting to look like a garden. My pots are filling with plants donated from my mum's beautiful, exuberant garden, from my old garden by the boat and from the unfortunately irresistible plant stall just outside the tube station (not that those ones are donated). All this has been helped along by a huge number of pots that the goth-girl's bf found for me insanely cheaply.

As for the sewing, my Nan's ancient Singer is working again and I re-taught myself how to thread it. Why do I forget that so quickly and so repeatedly?

I've been dabbling with making a quilt from old jeans for weeks now and haven't really got anywhere with it. When I drag my knitted blankets out into the garden to sprawl on they seem to magically cling on to dried grass bits for weeks afterwards, so something more obliging was definitely needed. Then I saw this and loved it!

So I asked the hoards if any of them had old jeans they didn't wear anymore and ended up with two pairs of blue denim, two black pairs and an egg yolk yellow pair. Perfect! 

I cut seven inch squares from the denim jeans, included pockets and seams and everything for texture, and hand sewed them together. The black and yellow make a great contrast and I love the contrast from the little bit of vintage shirt fabric that I grabbed when I ran out of yellow.

I plan to add two more rows of denim squares around the outside which will bring the final size to 5' square. Any larger and I wont be able to stretch my arms far enough to fold it easily.

This is where I've got to so far.

I'm going to add the names of all the lovely people who donated their cast-off jeans to one of their squares too.