Denim quilt

Blogger's quilt Festival Begins today; Amy over at Amy's Creative Side has a list of participants and some great prizes for us. So if you wish you could go to a quilt show and can't, visit all these quilts in blog-world. It's almost better than a show 'cause you get to read the stories behind the quilts.

I recently checked out 'the Quilts of Gee's Bend' from our library and they reminded me of the denim quilt I started while I was working on my PHT (Putting Hubby Through-College). This quilt was started in 1977, when I had NO money. It was finished 5 years later when I could afford a sheet to back it with.
I'm telling you this weighs a ton! Try getting this under your domestic machine to quilt. I DID. One of my first machine quilting projects, if not the first. When it gets dirty it is so bulky it has to be washed at the laundromat. But it was Brian's choice to sleep under it in Virginia (where the warmth was greatly appreciated) and in South Texas, year round. While my teen-aged son, Brian* was sick with cancer he continued to sleep under this quilt. It now has more holes than the original jeans had. It is backed with a red sheet. It has no binding; I used the 'pillowcase' method to finish the edge. I labeled it with a sharpie on the sheet and misspelled a word... I always felt like I cheated cause I bought some denim for the checkerboard border; some dark denim since none of our jeans were dark enough. We were also out of old jeans so I bleached some of the dark to get the light. I can't imagine using up ALL of my old jeans now. In fact I can't imagine using up any category of scrap; I keep making blocks and there are still scraps!

Yes, those are 2 boys on the roof of our garage, in TX there is only a small amount of time that this works. Most of the time I couldn't bribe them to get up there on the hot roof but other times they think it a treat that MOM WANTS them to climb on the roof. *Brian fought cancer for 18 months but died in 1999, at 16 years old.