The Makings of a Denim Blanket

A friend wanted to make her son a denim blanket for his bed.  It was to be heavy enough to help hold down some other blankets.  If you have wood heat, you know how the house sometimes gets a little chilly by morning!
This is what we did, step by step for you to be inspired to use up some old jeans too!

  Take some retired jeans

  Snip a little up the side seam

 Give a yank ~ start pulling and the denim will rip along the grain line and you'll end up with ...

 Strips of denim and little waste left over

 You can cut the strips up into squares or leave as strips. Sew squares, rectangles etc into strips.  I just made sure all the squares were the same height and didn't worry too much about width.

 I sewed in a pattern of squares and then a long strip

 If it gets big, you'll want to fold it over and make it accordion style to fit on your lap as you sew

It took me approx. 30 minutes to sew one row together with the other row, so budget your time in little chunks if you need to.  The blanket can get heavy, and I found doing a long strip between really helped!

Then we "sandwiched" the red flannel and polyester fill together with pins.

Loosely basted it together by hand to hold it in place.

There's your 3 layers.  denim right side OUT, filling, red flannel right side OUT.

Whenever I forget a technique in sewing, I do a quick Google search "How to miter corners" etc and find a great blog with a tutorial.  Wonderful help!

The one edge done, I left the rest up to my friend and she finished it!

All finished (well except the corner on the back)  They are going to draw a scene on it for the young man and dedicate his blanket that way.

I shared this on Frugally Sustainable