Finding creative things to do with old blue jeans is a bit of a passion of mine. Think about all you’ve been through together, those great-fitting friendly old jeans and you — who can bear to just trash them, when they get beyond wearing?

A recycled-denim quilt is, to my mind, the perfect solution.

Years ago I had a cosy and durable quilt made simply from diamond-shaped pieces of heavy flannel, plaid wool fabric, and recycled denim from old blue jeans. (Kind of like Dorothy Ainsworth’s quilt o’ Levi’s from Backwoods Home, but much smaller.) It went everywhere, and just got softer and more comforting with age… until age eventually caught up with it, and the fabric began to wear thin enough that the batting showed through in places…

Well, yesterday I came across a pattern — a quilt tutorial really, by the multi-talented Doreen Baros — for a Circle Blue Jeans Quilt that looks like a keeper.

The pattern is a little bit Cathedral Windows and a little bit Rob Peter to Pay Paul, and you can really get creative with the choice of lighter-weight fabric to show in the denim “windows” on the quilt.

Finish the edges of the circles with machine zig-zag or satin stitch, handsewn blanket stitch, or a neat-but-fiddley narrow hem, according to your taste and patience; or just sew it down and leave the unfinished denim edges to fray artistically in authentic blue-jeans style, like the sunshine-y summer-of-love-ish Circle Blue Jeans Quilt that Jessica Levitt made a few years back, following Doreen’s instructions.

Working with a material as heavy as denim, I’d definitely skip the batting on this one and also work it in squares of maybe three circles by three, depending on the size of the circles you decide to go with.

Wouldn’t this quilt be an interesting project to make with teeny-tiny miniature circles/squares? I wonder how small you could go and still handle the pieces… Hey, let me know if you decide to take on that challenge!

If you’ve seen a zig-zag quilt, you’ll immediately see the fascination. It looks like giant bands of rick-rack trim sewn into a quilt — but really, the zig-zag effect is achieved with a series of triangles and a trick of the eye.

Now, you might look at a zig-zag quilt and figure it’s pretty straightforward to make — but it turns out there are a couple of different ways to cut your triangle pieces and a couple of different ways to assemble them, too.

Check out these quilt tutorials for great instructions and, better yet, for the photographs and illustrations that are soooo essential to make sense of each quilter’s cutting and piecing methods –

I love the way this shows how the quilting community tends to share ideas and build on each others’ creativity, too:

Taylor Groneck has a quick tutorial for a zig-zag quilt based on a pattern in Denyse Schmidt Quilts, and with the advice of…

Nettie Pete (of Etsy and A Quilt Is Nice fame) who shares her Zig-Zag Quilt Tutorial for the quilt inspired by…

The Purl Bee’s Zig Zag Quilt. The Purl Bee is the blog of Joelle & Jennifer Hoverson’s awesome and inventive crafty-sewing shop, Purl, by the way — and if you visit The Purl Bee, better plan to set aside a couple hours to explore… and you’ll want to check out their Triangle Tutorial, too, if you’ve ever had trouble making nice trim corners.

In fact, most quilters (except maybe the real quilting divas among us) agree that the main challenge of a zig-zag quilt — once you’ve picked the fabrics and planned the colours layout — is to take care to get the points of the triangles lined up right when you’re sewing them together.

Another help for this might be the triangle templates and clear how-to illustrations in a new free zig-zag quilt pattern that Anna Maria Horner, author of Seams to Me: 24 New Reasons to Love Sewing, offers as a free PDF download on her blog. “The Folk Dance” is what Horner calls her version of the vintage zig-zag quilt pattern.

Jude Hill is the guiding hand behind the What If… Quilting Collaborative, an online group of about 40 keen quilters (and counting!) that has just one mission:

… to revisit the Crazy Quilting style and share our results. We are asking questions about technique and rules and style using the traditional Crazy Quilt framework as a jumping off point.

There’s a pledge to keep an open mind and to challenge each other to new heights of creativity, and a Flickr group to share the results of “what-if” in every colour of the rainbow and every technique you might imagine. It’s textile art, and cooperative creativity that goes to the heart of the quilting tradition — in a very nontraditional way!

Valentine’s Day on the horizon, and hearts are everywhere. Half the display windows of stores downtown look like a teenybopper’s bedroom… which brings us to quilts, doesn’t it? Hearts… Quilts… and this quick clever “Mosaic Hearts” quilt pattern, free at Moonlight Quilts.

It’s all little squares and straight lines, but the final effect can be quite subtle with the right choice of fabrics.

Beth Lancaster, the life-long quilter and seamstress who designs and creates the heirloom-quallity custom Moonlight Quilts, suggests the option of applique photographs in the centre of each heart motif, or in the corners of the quilt.

This is a good project for a beginning quilter, Beth says, and demonstrates the method of consturction to take any guesswork out of the project.

There’s something about the comfort of a handmade quilt that’s a natural match for a good cause. And since October is Breast Cancer Awareness (Pink Ribbon) month, it’s a perfect time for making a quilt in pink.

Rosie’s Calico Cupboard gives us a free pattern for her Ribbon of Concern Quilt, with pieced blocks that look like pink fabric ribbons, to signify support for those with breast cancer.

(You could easily adapt this quilt pattern for other causes that are associated with different coloured ribbons, of course — yellow ribbons to support the troops, for example, or the white ribbon campaign to end violence against women.)

If you’re looking for something a little more traditional, Quilt Pink offers a nice selection of free quilt block patterns (PDF file) to suit any quilter’s skill level.

Or you might simply adapt a favourite quilt pattern to use fabrics in the colour of the cause.

Don’t forget the possibilities of embroidery and embellishment, too — what about incorportating a fabric-printed photograph or pieces of clothing with a special personal meaning into a memory quilt?

For more inspiration, see the Quilt Pink gallery for photographs of a gorgeous variety of Breast Cancer Quilts pieced by more than 1,000 quilt shops across the United States. American Patchwork & Quilting magazine is selling them off in an online quilt auction to benefit Susan G. Komen for the Cure is running now on eBay.

Technorati Tags: pink ribbon, quilts, free patterns, charity

Rich colours of autumn make an opulent-looking quilt, yet the straight-edge pieces put the “Crossing Paths” pattern well within the reach of a beginning quilter.

Here, “Crossing Paths” is created in Andover Fabric’s gorgeous “Daylily Days” line of quilting fabrics, both designed by Renée Nanneman of Need’l Love.

The pattern uses a total of 25 blocks, each 10½” square, and the finished size of the quilt is approximately 64″ x 72½”.

It would be easy enough simply to increase the number of squares used, if you wanted to make a larger quilt — or sew up just a few squares and add a rod pocket, to make a lovely autumn wall hanging.

Either way, you can download the free quilt pattern (PDF), by courtesy of Andover Fabrics.

Technorati Tags: free, quilts, patterns, sewing

Anna Maria Horner’s inner gypsy had to have been at play when she designed her 22 Lollipops Quilt and Bohemian Quilt — and the fabric collections that inspired them, too.

And that’s just a wonderful thing, for lovers of color and pattern…

Even more wonderful, these two original quilt patterns are both free for your own sewing pleasure.

I love the elongated diamonds of the Bohemian quilt pattern, but the idea of whiling away the summer evenings with the hand-applique of circles for Lollipops is equally tempting…

Or maybe just roll around in all those gorgeous fabric prints, revelling in the colours (a bit like the way we pile up armloads of autumn leaves each autumn, then tumble giggling into the heap of glorious reds and golds).

Good luck deciding which of Anna Maria’s quilts you’d like to make first!

If you’re thinking of getting into quilting, a baby quilt or wall hanging is about the right size of project to begin with.

Fat Quarter offers a number of free quilt patterns to download and print, including the simple yet interesting Baby Four-Patch Quilt.

It’s a great way to use up any odds-and-ends of fabric you may have leftover from other sewing projects, and the small scale makes a baby quilt so encouragingly quick to finish up! I’d sew it up in soft flannel and just machine-quilt it straight along the main seams, for a fast and easy “blankie” to keep baby comfy on car trips and picnics.

I haven’t mentioned it for a while, but the hunt for the perfect pin cushion continues… to go to the birds…

Web-Goddess gives a nice clear set of free illustrated instructions for sewing up a set of funky chicken pincushions, and they do have a certain appeal.

A traditional take on the same basic idea has the chicken made up of log cabin quilt squares. You can find a free pattern for the log cabin chicken pincushion at Quilting Works, or get it ready-made by lanningslee on Etsy.

Either way… a great project to use up scraps of fabric… and, hey! a perfect “impulse item” to make for a fund-raiser bazaar or craft sale.

I’m not a quilter, myself, but I did enjoy some time this week surfing quilting sites, in search of yardage information I needed to buy backing fabric for an inherited quilt top.

It was pieced by my late mother-in-law, shortly before her descent into Alzheimer’s disease stole her ability to work at the crafts that gave her such joy for many years.

Finally the time has come for this quilt to be finished — the local church ladies have a quilting circle, and I’ve been on their waiting list for some time now.

I love the idea that the church ladies will be doing the actual quilting and finishing on this quilt: it will give the piece even more meaning as a memory piece, as these ladies were my mother-in-law’s dear friends.

But how much fabric should I buy for the backing?

That was the question — I’m not a quilter, as I say — and I was happy to find the answer quickly in a quilt backing fabric requirements chart online.

While looking for that, however, I also stumbled across a handy quilt fabric calculator, which helps you to figure out the amount of material needed to make a pieced quilt top. You put in the size of the blocks, the number of blocks across and down the quilt, and the width of the fabric. Hit the “calculate” button and it tells you the yardage of fabric required!

I also found a wonderfully inspiring article called You Too Can Make a Quilt!. Something tells me, it won’t be too long before I can’t resist starting a quilt of my very own.

And I understand that there’s something called “lap quilting” that lets you build a quilt one block at a time. That sounds like just the thing for a beginner like me. If I get overwhelmed, my “quilt” can always turn into a cushion cover!