Recycled Denim Quilt

I am passionate about recycling and can get quite obsessive about making sure anything than can be recycled goes in the correct bins.  Before our local council recycled plastic, I used to save ours up and take it to the bins in another district.  Only when I was passing, of course, so I didn’t use up more energy driving than was saved in recycling the plastic.

So I have been saving up old jeans to make a quilt.  We go through a lot in our house.  The kids keep growing – fancy that!  And also the adult jeans get trashed crawling around on the floor with the kids.  So I’d cut them all into rectangles to make a quilt.  It took forever and frankly, I wouldn’t use the kids jeans again as there was little reward for all the effort.  However, I have finally finished the quilt.  It is made from different width strips and will make a decent single bed covering.  I like the subtle nature of the colours from the worn denim.  It reminds me of the sashiko exhibition I saw in York a number of years ago, which showed lots of different old Japanese work clothes being stitched together again and again.

I now have lots of little rectangles of denim left over.  Any ideas what I could make from them apart from cushions?

Quilters' Guild Conference in Dundee

Time is meant to go quicker when you get older.  It seems to go so fast now – what is it going to be like when I am finally mature?  Actually, I don’t believe now I’ll ever be mature, just wrinklier and even stiffer!  When the Quilters’ Guild asked me to run a workshop and do a talk at their conference in Dundee, March 2012 seemed a long way off and now it is only next month. 

Has anyone been to a Quilters’ Guild Conference?  I’m shamed to admit I’ve never made it before and I’m looking forward to the experience.  If you are going, please do come along to my talk.  It’s at 9.30am on Sunday 25^th March, the morning after my daughter’s birthday.  It’s also the day the clocks change and we lose an hour of sleep.  I do hope people will be able to drag themselves out of bed to come and hear me... and next time I attend an event, I’m definitely going to the early morning speaker out of solidarity!

Goddess at the Scottish Story Telling Centre

Finally, it feels as if my work is coming together.  I am very impatient by nature and want everything to happen now, but the world doesn’t work like that and it means I have to write lots of applications, etc before I find the one that is going to be successful.  Over the past few months, I have written many applications for a variety of things and so far February is turning out to be a fruitful month (4 acceptances vs 2 rejections!)

When I saw the call for submissions for an exhibition entitled ‘Goddess’, related to a theatre production at the Scottish Story Telling Centre, I knew that I had to apply and that it would fit in perfectly with the themes of my ‘Unsung Muses’ work.  So I was thrilled to get an email today telling me that my work will be included.  The exhibition opens in Edinburgh on Friday 2^nd March, with a Private View from 7-9pm.  Please come along if you can.  It should be an interesting show, with work from a number of different artists.  I can’t wait to see their work and how it fits with the theme.  All I need to do now is organise the childcare so I can hang the work...!