Sunflowers!, What's on the Design Wall

What’s on the Design Wall

tierneycreates: a fusion of textiles and smiles

This post is a follow up to the 07/14/16 post What’s on the Design Wall (as well as another post mentioned in the Postscript section)

Terry, “The Quilting Husband”, continues his “take over” the large temporary design wall in the hallway (temporary until we install a permanent large design wall in the hallway) with his piece in progress.  Here is his current progress from the 07/14/16 post – he has now inserted strips of pieced recycled denim between the rows.

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We love recycling denim. Did you know how much it takes to produce a pair of jeans and the impact on the environment to create one pair of denim jeans?

I read an interesting article in the Winter 2015 edition of Interweave’s Stitch magazine, “Denim; Shaping the World, One Pair at a Time” by Kathy Augustine (pages 16 – 17).

Here are some interesting numbers from this article to give you a perspective of what it “costs” environmentally to make a pair of jeans:

An estimated 2 billion pairs of blue jeans are produced each year. It takes one bale of cotton (approximately 480 pounds of cotton) to produced 215 pairs of jeans, or 2.23 pounds of cotton per pairs. One acre of farmland produced approximately 740 pounds of cotton and cotton requires about 1,000 gallons of water per pound of fiber, so it took 2230 gallons of water to make that pair of jeans you are wearing and the average American has 7 pairs of jeans.

So I get pretty happy when I am involved in denim recycling and letting the effort all that water go towards something that can keep someone warm and cozy or decorate their house after the denim is no longer wearable.

I will wait and see what Terry does with the rest of the fabric for this piece he is working on (like an interesting border?) and then I would like to make a table runner with smaller pieces of recycled denim and the scraps from his piece. I think it would make an interesting “Country” style table runner.

Postscript

My sunflower obsession continues, as discussed in the post Waiting for the Sunflowers. This weekend I went over a friend’s house who had massive amounts of sunflowers in her front yard . Several of the sunflower plants had reached “Sunflower Tree” heights (nearly “house-size” sunflowers!).

Here are some of my photos (note the sunflowers were towards the end of their blooming):

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Of course I took some cuttings home to put in my sunroom!

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(Okay Tierney! Enough with the sunflowers already, move onto another topic.)

Maybe. I cannot promise sunflowers won’t be mentioned again in a future post (smile).

Published by tierneycreates: a fusion of textiles and smiles

Quilter, crafter, obsessive tea drinker and lover of all furry creatures (especially dogs and cats) - join me on my tierneycreates blog as I share stories from "A Crafter's Life".

19 thoughts on “What’s on the Design Wall”

  5. The denim looks great as sashing! I finished my stacked coins top, but it will wait a while until I quilt it. In the meantime, I have another top in progress (Delectable Mountains) and a baby quilt to make.

    You touched on an important topic with the denim production. I’ve had a hard time finding stats on quiltmaking environmental costs (though it would likely depress me) and also good info on alternative ways to reduce them. Recycling fabric is certainly a great way to do that.

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    1. Thanks Melanie, I look forward to seeing your stacked coins quilt on your lovely blog! I was lucky to come across that article on the environmental cost of denim it was very enlightening!

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  8. Terry, the quilting husband, is doing a very nice job with this new creation! I like the texture that the denim brings to the quilt. BTW, thanks for the sunflower pics, another reason to smile today!

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  10. Pingback: Terry the Quilting Husband – Update – tierneycreates

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