Selecting Used Jeans for a Rag Denim Quilt

Video Transcript

"In this segment, we wanted to concentrate on jeans. We mentioned to you that, of course, you could use old jeans for the pieces of the quilt. As you can see here I have two colors. I have a dark denim pair of jeans and a medium light denim pair of jeans. What I wanted to point out is that there are portions of the jeans that you might not be able to use. For instance, the knee section sometimes is stretched out and really faded and you will never get it to be flat and look nice. You want to avoid areas such as seams and hems. And, we found that if you had a size, for instance this is a size 38 waist, 30 inch long men's jeans, we can get 30 bricks out of this pair of jeans alone. Now that?s all dependent on whether you have a very good pair of jeans to use. But if you have lots of warn spots, you may get less jean fabric out of that. Obviously, if you are using children's jeans or smaller size jeans than this, you will get less bricks out of them. So you have to figure that accordingly. For the size jeans we are using, which was the 38 X 30, you would probably need 4 pair of jeans per color, which would mean 16 pairs in total. One thing to steer clear of are jeans that have Lycra woven in to them. As you know, Lycra really stretches and it can cause difficulty when sewing the jeans and it also looks a little different than the cotton woven jeans that we would like to use."