My first quilt (so heavy!)

I am visiting my mom for Christmas; look what she has on her bed!  

I started this quilt around 2003 (my last year of high school), thinking it was a good way to use worn old jeans.  After all, jeans wear out at cuffs and pockets, knees and sometime inner thighs, but not the lower leg area.  Why not save some fabric from the landfill?  So I salvaged squares from my old jeans, and stuff from the thrift store (XXL yielded plenty of fabric).  My mom told another homeschooling mom about my project, and she gave me a pile of jeans that her son "never wore".  (Come to find out he'd paid a lot of money for designer jeans, and was super peeved to find out his mom gave them away and I cut them up.  Oh, moms!)  I removed pockets and deliberately cut the squares to showcase the difference between faded and non-faded areas.  

I designed the quilt to fit my parents' queen-size bed.  Several black pieces were set aside to mark the corners, and three layers beyond the corners for drape.  I arranged the pieces to distribute the lights and darks evenly, piled them in neat stacks with labels and a plan, then put the whole pile away and forgot it!

In 2009, when I was living elsewhere and wanted to sew something, I pulled the denim quilt pieces out.  As I sewed each seam, I finger-pressed it open, then used a 3-step zig-zag to hold each seam allowance down.  This was time-consuming and annoying, but looked cool.  My sewing machine didn't much appreciate the hard work, and the quilt got heavier and heavier.  The project went from fun to onerous pretty fast, but I stubborned my way through finishing the top.  Then I put it away again.  

I moved out of state and forgot the quilt existed, but I guess one day my mom found it.  Nothing irks her like an unfinished object!  She took it to a shop with a long-arm, and told them she had no clue and could they help her.  They sandwiched it with a king-size batt and a cotton backing she provided, and showed her how to use the long-arm.  

As far as I can tell or she can remember, she used the long-arm to do large basting stitches, to hold it together.  Then she took it home and tied it with cotton thread, and bound the edges with a pieced binding, using the rest of the denim scraps.  

The finished quilt is remarkably heavy, but fits the bed well and is warm.  It looks cool, too!  My mom has never washed it; we'd probably need to take it to a laundromat with an oversized industrial washing machine!  

Later, I found out that quilters generally hate the idea of denim quilts, because the fabric is so heavy.  My mom says now that she wished she had just backed it with no batting!  

So that was my first quilt: a simple, HEAVY denim one-patch.  A decade-year project finished by my mom.