So Much Denim

The pile of denim strips is now double this size.

I have no new photos today.  This photo is the one from last week.  This week I spent more time cutting denim strips.  I now have two brown paper grocer bags full of strips.  It takes a while to cut up a pair of jeans into two inch (5.08 centimeter) strips.  Some days I cut up one pair of jeans, other days I may get in two pair.  One day last weekend I had a marathon day and cut up four pair. My hands were hurting after that and I resolved that taking a slower approach to this project was going to be the better option. 

The directions for this rug said to tear the denim rather than cut it.  I tried tearing it, but the fabric is heavy, and my hands just was not going to be able to take it.  It would have been quicker to tear the fabric than to cut it.  In the long run, not being able to tear it may turn out to be a good thing.  I have been wavering in the manner of construction of the rug. Torn strips have raveled edges.  Some of the other projects will need a firmer edge on them.

I started out with a photo of a rug in a magazine and some minimal instructions on the width of the strips.  It looked nice and sounded easy enough.  This rug was even something that I could do in the evening sitting in front of the television.  However, the more I looked at it, the less enchanted I became with that type of rug design.  I might add that the rug was part of a larger photo of a decorated room.  It obviously looks better from a distance.  I saw a close up photo of the same type of rug on recently on Pintrest, and lost all interest in that style.  Up close it looks a little less finished than I had in mind.

However, there are so many different ways to make a denim rug that I still have plenty of options.  Rugs can be braided, hooked, crocheted, woven, and foundation pieced to name a few.  Many of these rugs will take much less time than the one I initially planned to make.  Some of them will require using a sewing machine, so I will not have evening work time.   

Some of the rugs will take much less denim than I needed to use for my first choice.  It may mean that I will have a lot of denim strips left over.  There might be more denim projects in my future.  I won't be making one denim project after the other though.  They will be interspersed throughout the year.  Last year I spent a lot of time on one major project and experienced a case of burnout.  I am not ready to repeat that so soon. 

Next week I will have information and pictures on the beginning of the rug.   Check back again on Sunday afternoon for the latest on this project.

The Denim Project

My pile of denim strips.

I started working on my denim project, or projects as the case might be.  Some time ago, I saw a rug made out of denim strips in a magazine.  I wanted a small runner to put on the side of my bed.  It is cold stepping out of the bed onto the floor in the winter.  I thought that this might be a small rug project that I could undertake. 

Initially I had started with the idea of making a larger rug like the one I had seen in a magazine.  But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to be a lot of work.  Trying to sew a large rug is going to be heavy.  Since it was only a picture of the finished project, I really have no way of knowing how that particular rug was put together.  I am guessing that it is made in strips that are then attached to each other.  

It may be that a heavy duty industrial sewing machine is needed for this project.  I am hoping that my home sewing machine will be up to it.  My main concern is that a heavy rug would create too much drag and the fabric will not move well through the feed dogs.  My sewing machine is old, but still working well.  I expect it will work well with heavier needles used for denim projects.   Perhaps a walking foot is in order here as well.  As usual, this is one of my experiments.  I will find out what works and what does not. 

Before I could begin the rug, I had to have a lot of scrap denim.  I put out a call to friends for old denim.  I received several pairs of jeans.  I also had some of my own old jeans to add to the pile.  While it is nowhere near the amount of denim needed for the larger project, it is a good start.  I have been cutting them up for the last week.  I did not specify the color of denim, other that to say that I wanted blue denim.  I did not want to add black or other colors into the mix.  I received every shade of blue; from blues so pale that they were almost white to deepest indigo.  Most of the blues fell in the range of light stone wash to medium stone wash.  Although it might be nicer to stick to one color of denim, I am going ahead with using all colors. 

This week, I have been working on cutting the denim pants into two inch strips the length of the pants.  Some strips are longer than others due to the curves and seams in the pants.  At this point I have not decided whether to further cut the strips into a standard length or just leave them random lengths.  I am thinking random lengths would be better because I don't want all the ends of the pieces matching up.

Next step is to overcome the nay sayers.  I told the women at my sit and sew about my project and one woman told me that she had a friend who made a denim rug and said she would never do it again.  I mentally fended that one off by saying to myself that this sounds like every project I have ever undertaken.  Then my husband inquired about my denim project.  After I explained that it was a rug, he said, "If you want a rug why don't you go out and buy one?"  His logic was harder to refute.  I started thinking, "Do I really want to do this project?"  What might I do with all this denim instead?"  

Anyway, at this point, I have a grocery bag full of denim strips.  I plan to start working with those and see where it takes me.   If it is too onerous I might change up the way I made the rug.  Or if making a rug proves too difficult, the strips may end up as a bed spread, totes, or some other project.  But, I am going to give the rug a shot first.  At worst, I can always pull out a seam ripper and take it apart if I need to retrieve the strips.

Check back next week on Sunday to see what progress has been made on this project.

At Least a Start on Projects

Last week I blogged that I was just coming out of a bout of creative burnout.  I actually worked on a project.  There was a joke that pre-dates the internet that is applicable to this project.  One time a motivational speaker came in to a business class I was taking.  They handed out colorful circles with the letters TUIT printed on it.  Then the speaker said, "You now have a round Tuit.  It is time to get started on the thing you said you were going to do when you get around to it."  That is exactly what I worked on this week.  One of those projects that I said I would do when I got around to it.

This was not an art project.  It was a utilitarian project.  I have a mop for cleaning laminate and hard wood flooring.  When the mop was purchased (seemingly ages ago) it came with some reusable, washable terrycloth covers that slipped over the mop head for cleaning the floors.  I used the mop covers until they started to wear out.  When I went to purchase more mop heads, I found that the reusable,  terry cloth ones were no longer available.  All the mop covers were being made out of microfiber.  At least locally, no terry covers were to be found.  I hesitated to order them online.  Shipping and handling are so expensive that it is not worth sending the product back if it is the wrong size mop head.

I hated the microfiber mop covers.  They left streaks all over the floor.  I kept saying that I would find replacement mop heads.  In other words' "getting around to it."  Finally, with only a single mop head left I decided to try to make my own mop head covers.  It did not look like it would be that hard if you happened to have the needed materials at hand.

I hate to say it but I am a terrible pack rat.  I save little odds and ends  leftover from projects because I may need them for some future project.  I hate to throw out bits of wood, metal, beads, elastic, or thread because I never know what I will need.  I like to be thrifty.   If I have something on hand, it helps keep the costs of my art and crafts down.  It seems like I have an incredible amount of stuff stashed away in my studio.  At some point, the room is so full that I need to purge some of the stuff.  I am at that point again, but before I throw anything out I try to use up as much of it as possible. 

My sewing notions are overflowing at the moment.  I have buttons, elastics, zippers, hook bias binding, and loop tape.  I have bobbins that are half-filled with thread.  I have thread colors that were purchased for specific projects that are languishing in boxes with no purpose.  I decided that the mop head project would be an ideal way to use some of them up.  I don't care whether the thread color matches if I am using the item to wash the floor. 

I measured the mop and added a little extra so that the mop cover would come up over the back of the mop head and be held on by elastic.  One of my pet peeves with the purchased mop heads, even the terry cloth ones was that they were so tight that it was hard to pull them on.  Sometimes a cover would slip off because there was barely enough fabric to cover the base.  By adding a little extra fabric I reasoned that the cover would stay on better.  What I finally settled on was an eleven by sixteen inch (27.94 x 40.64 cm.) rectangle.  Of course that works for my mop.  Measure your mop if you plan to try this project.

A worn terry cloth towel was cut into the rectangle.  I rounded off the corners.  Then I sewed around the edge of the rectangle with a triple zig zag stitch to prevent the towel from unraveling.  After that, I added elastic around the entire edge using a straight stitch.  In case you have never worked with elastic:  you anchor the elastic to the project with a few stitches.  Then pull the elastic tight and keep it stretched as you sew it down.   When you have gone all the way round the project anchor the two ends of the elastic by overlapping them and sewing over them.  When you allow the elastic to relax, the cover curls up towards the center.  Since the elastic I had on hand was no-roll elastic, it was too rigid to fold over and sew down on the underside.  This is more of an aesthetic problem than a functional problem.  I really don't care if there is an edge showing on the underside of the elastic.  The edges are zig zaged and won't unravel.   If I had thinner elastic, I could have folded it over the fabric and sewn both edges down at once.

This was an easy project.  From cutting the fabric to finishing off the elastic only took about sixteen minutes.  I made five of them.  That should give me enough mop heads to clean a number of rooms. Because this was the first project I had worked on in quite some time, I had to clean and oil my sewing machine before I started.  Now the machine is ready for my next project.  I can't wait to get started on it.

Check back next Sunday on the start of a new project.

Crafting for 2019 - A New Beginning After Creative Burnout

Regular readers may have noted that I have pretty much been missing in action for most of the last couple of months.  I had hit the dreaded creative burnout.  I did not have an idea.  I did not have any motivation.  I did not have any time.  In short, what I needed to do was take a break.  This is the way creativity works.  You may work for weeks, months or years and all of a sudden your motivation to create vanishes.  When that happens it seems as if you have fallen into a deep pit and you cannot get out.  It feels as if you Muse or Daimon has completely deserted you.   (Daimon is ancient Greek for guiding spirit.  Spelled Daemon in Latin.)

For a while, I tried to power through thew burnout, working on a project that I had started with the best of intentions.  The project dragged on for the better part of the year.  I finally forced myself to work on it until I came to a reasonable stopping point.  When I hit that point, I walked out of the studio and did not go back in for quite some time.  Everything piled up in there as more and more items were placed in the room because I did not have time to put them away.  The worse the studio looked, the more I avoided it.

In the last couple of weeks, I managed to clean up the studio enough that I had an open space.  Eventually, an empty (more or less empty anyway) work surface appeared.  In search of something to do to motivate myself to get started, I pulled out a pattern and started envisioning what I might do with it.  At that point, we entered into a kitchen renovation.  The pattern sat there, I did not have much time to even think about it.  I have not touched it since.  Although I did manage to buy matching thread for the project when I made a Walmart run after the New Year.

Finally, last night, the first inkling of an idea started to emerge.  It is the first creative thought of any kind I have had in months.  Thoughts started running through my head as to how I would make this part or that part and what type of materials I would use.  Now I am looking forward to getting into the studio.

My thoughts also turned to another project that has been languishing in the studio.  It was started, but I lacked any enthusiasm to work on it further.  I am ready to get working on that as well.  The problem with that project is that I need forty pairs of denim jeans to complete the item.  I don't have that many yet, but I have decided to start with what I have and trust that some jeans will come my way as I go along.  I have tried to avoid purchasing the jeans at a thrift store.  Even at a few dollars a pair, that is going to run into quite a bit of money.  I am not sure that I have enough interest in the project to put that type of money into it.  I have decided to start with the jeans I have collected so far and go from there.  Either I will love the project and decide to purchase the jeans, or I might be able to collect more old jeans from friends.  Or, I suppose, I could decide that the project was a complete waste of time and give up on it if necessary.   The last thing I want to do right now is get bogged down in another uninspiring project.  At least it feels good to be starting on something.

Generally, at the first of the year I make a list of creative goals for the year.  I am not going to do that right now.  Last year I fell woefully short of my goal and that added to the stress of being in a creative burnout.  For now, I am just going to start on a project and just let myself enjoy the process without pressure.  I feel that at this point, I have to treat recovery from a creative burnout almost as if I were recovering from a physical injury.  I just need to make slow steady progress towards being creative again.  That may not make sense to someone who has never hit a creative burnout, but if you have, you will know what I mean.  Just letting myself work at my own pace is going to help me look forward to getting back into the studio regularly.  From there, the process will take over and I will be back to having more ideas flowing.

So, I will be blogging on my progress on a couple of projects in short order.  Check back next Sunday to see what progress I have made.  I will also be blogging about another project that has carried over from last year to this one.