Oh look at me – now that I’ve caught up on all my blogging buddies’ posts (well I think I have), I’m trying to pretend that I am back to posting regularily 😉
Here’s a follow up to my mid November 2024 post – ScrapHappy November 2024: Update on Denim Quilt. The denim quilt you all are probably tired of reading about, is now hung on the wall leading up the stairway from the first to second floor of my house.
Here are photos:
John built the wooden hanger for the piece which I place through the hanging sleeve I added to the back of the quilt.
I am very pleased! We really needed something on that blank wall and the quilt seems to be what it needed!
Postscript
RECYCLED HOPE VS UPCYCLED HOPE
This quilt will become part of my “Recycled Hope” series of quilts which I describe as follows:
The Recycled Hope an ongoing series of improvisational art quilts using recycled materials to include denim as the primary fabric on many of the pieces, combined with other recycled materials. “Hope” and the interpretation of the word “hope” is the primary theme of infused into these pieces.Most of the fabrics were not reusable as clothing or home decor and were destined to end up in a landfill. Reimagining recycled clothing and other materials into art quilts satisfies my hopeful desire to honor the environment and make art that is eco-conscious. Ending up in an art quilt is a better outcome than ending up in a landfill.
One of the comments on the post ScrapHappy October 2024: Recycled Hope I wrote in October 2024 about this series, went something like this (paraphrased): “shouldn’t your series Recycled Hope be called instead Upcycled Hope?”
I thought about this and researched on line various definitions of “recycled” vs “upcycled”.
Recycled: “having been used before and then put through a process so that it can form a new product” (Cambridge Dictionary)
Upcycled: “to recycle (something) in such a way that the resulting product is of a higher value than the original item : to create an object of greater value from (a discarded object of lesser value)” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary)
After reviewing those two definitions and thinking a bit, I’ve decided to eventually rename my series – UPCYCLED HOPE!
I’ve added to my list of things to do to update my tierneycreates website…
It’s the 15th of the month and time for my monthly “ScrapHappy” post as part of the ScrapHappy group I belong run by Kate and Gun. At the end of this post I have a link to the other blogs participating in this monthly event in case you’d like to check out their ScrapHappy posts.
The 15th of the month came around quicker than anticipated and I already blogged about the 22nd block I made for the very scrappy Farm Girl Vintage quilt I am working on September 26 (see post I Sewed Something!) so I couldn’t use that for my October ScrapHappy post, sigh.
So instead I will discuss my series of art quilts made from scraps of recycled denim, clothing and home decorating fabrics – Recycled Hope; and update on you that latest quilt I am working on in that series.
The Recycled Hope Series
Recycled Hope an ongoing series of improvisational art quilts using recycled materials to include denim as the primary fabric on many of the pieces, combined with other recycled materials.
“Hope” and the interpretation of the word “hope” is the primary theme of infused into these pieces. Most of the fabrics were not reusable as clothing or home decor and were destined to end up in a landfill. Reimagining recycled clothing and other materials into art quilts satisfies my hopeful desire to honor the environment and make art that is eco-conscious. Ending up in an art quilt is a better outcome than ending up in a landfill.
My first quilt in the series, Recycled Road, was made for annual art quilt show for the local SAQA (Studio Art Quilt Associates) group I belonged while living in Central Oregon:
This quilt was made using my late husband’s clothing that he no longer wanted, several recycled jeans, a little recycled scrap home decor fabric and this awful pair of orange corduroy pants someone gave me to use in an art quilt. The pants were too hideous to donate to be work as clothing but worked in a quilt! The quilt measures 18 inches by 40 inches which was the required dimensions for the art show which was titled “Pathways”.
I no longer own this quilt, it was purchased by a friend who wanted to support my art.
The second quilt I made in the series was also for an annual art quilt show for the local SAQA (Studio Art Quilt Associates) group I belonged while living in Central Oregon and titled Recycled Door:
This quilt is composed of recycled denim, recycled home decor fabric, and a little of those awful orange corduroy pants (I got a lot of use out of those pants, fabric wise). It also measures 18 inches by 40 inches which was the required dimensions for the art show which was titled “Doors”. This quilt was purchased by a private collector.
The third quilt in the series was also for an annual art quilt show for the local SAQA (Studio Art Quilt Associates) group I belonged while living in Central Oregon and titled Recycled Love:
Made from recycled jeans and home decor fabric, the Artist Statement for this quilt is as follows:
The first law of thermodynamics states that the total amount of energy in a system cannot be created nor destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another.A quilt is made from changing the existing “love energy” from the quilt maker’s heart into a pieced textile; ultimately recycling that love energy into the quilt’s recipient heart.
It also measures 18 inches by 40 inches which was the required dimensions for the art show which was titled “The Threads That Bind”.
I have this quilt hung in my hallway next to my studio to remind me that “Quilts are Love”.
Here are the rest of the quilts in this series which were not created for a specific show.
Recycled Windows of Conversation:
This quilt measures 55” W x 59” L; and is made from recycled jeans, various recycled clothing, and recycled home decor fabric. It was the largest recycled denim quilt i’d made to date.
It was purchased by an art dealer on behalf of their client, and it now sits in the common area of an upscale apartment complex in downtown Seattle, Washington (see post Oh So That’s What Happened to It!).
Recycled Windows:
This quilt measures 18” W x 39″ L, and is made from recycled clothing, recycled denim, and recycled home decorating fabric. It was juried into the New Mexico ArtsArt in Public Places Program but was not selected by any of their public buildings for purchase. So it hangs in my bedroom and I enjoy looking at it everyday!
Recycled Business Casual:
Somewhere in this series of quilts I made this quilt from recycled jeans, recycled wool blankets and menswear wool suiting scraps (this is where I got the name “Recycled Business Casual“. It was more of an experiment than an actual art quilt but it did show along with many of the other quilts shown above in my first solo show: The Wardrobe Meets the Wall in April 2019 at the Seattle Municipal Tower in Downtown Seattle, Washington.
Current Project Update
And finally let’s get to my current project in progress to add to the Recycled Hope series – a denim quilt made with lots of recycled jeans and recycled home decor fabric scraps:
The tentative name for this quilt is “What Direction Do I Go?” but I am rethinking the name as my head is in a different space now than when I first started the quilt in October 2023 (What’s on the Design Wall: An “Upcycled” Work).
I have it back up on the design wall and it is set up for quilting with the backing and batting attached.
I am working out what quilting design I want to use. I created a sample square of scrap denim, backing and batting to try out some designs:
I am really looking forward to completing this quilt and I have a place on my living room to upstairs stairway reserved to hang this approximately 55 inches by 55 inches quilt.
After I finish this quilt, there will likely be more recycled denim quilts in the future as I have a nice stash of recycled jeans in my studio:
Earlier this year a local charity thrift shop had an “All Jeans $2” sale and I stocked up!
Here are the other bloggers that participate in the ScrapHappy monthly posting event, check out their blogs linked below for their ScrapHappy posts:
Not sure what came over me but I somehow quickly finished the recycled denim quilt I shared in the post What’s On The Design Wall, and got it hung on the wall.
Here is the backing I selected for the quilt, I picked it up a couple of week ago at a thrift store:
Like the pattern designer/author of Wise Craft Quilts, Blair Stocker did, I wanted to hand tie the quilt (see cover of book in image below):
It’s been many years (maybe 16 or more?) since I hand tied a quilt – I forgot how meditative and pleasing it was to hand tie the three layers together with a large needle and yarn:
Once the hand tying was complete, I used the same fabric as the backing for the quilt’s binding.
Over the past couple weeks I’ve been working to turn this pile of recycled denim jeans,
into this:
I borrowed from the public library the book by Blair Stocker: Wise Craft Quiltsover and over again, until I finally broke down and bought the book, all because of the quilt on the front cover:
That was several years ago and finally I decided to actually just make the quilt I’ve been love struck over.
The quilt is comprised of 30 blocks (5 x 6) and when fully assembled will tentatively measure 50 inches x 54 inches (1.27 meters x 1.37 meters or 127 cm x 137 cm).
I am going to hand tie the quilt like the author did in her sample, I like the rustic look it gives to this recycled denim quilt.
Here is the first layout on my design wall when I got all the blocks completed:
But I had my partner John take a look at the layout and do some tweaking (since tentatively I am going to hang the completed quilt above our bed) and this is the final layout:
I’ll share an image of the completed quilt in a future post. I am so excited to finally be making this quilt!
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.
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):
Of course I took some cuttings home to put in my sunroom!
(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).
tierneycreates 