Recycle Clothing Into a Memory Quilt
January 21, 2009 by Katelyn Thomas
Filed under Crafty Solutions
I needed to discard an entire closet worth of clothing this week. All those things I hadn’t worn in ten years and wouldn’t wear for another ten but had a sentimental attachment to all had to go. It was something I should have done a long time ago, but I never was able to bring myself to do it. Funny how needing space for something else made it happen in about 30 minutes!
Anyway, some of the stuff really wasn’t that special, but a few things really had wonderful memories attached to them. I didn’t want to completely get rid of them, but I didn’t want to toss out clothes in my other closet to store them and I didn’t want to use up storage space in my attic, which is filling up fast.
So, I’m thinking the answer is to cut several five inch squares from each garment and stacked them in a single tidy pile until I can find time to sew a memory quilt. A simple charm quilt pattern will work best, I think. I won’t even feel guilty about cutting them up because there are a lot of scary 80’s shoulder pads in there!
You can’t get much thriftier than a brand new quilt made out of things you already had around the house, so I thought I’d share my idea with you.
Photo by Bethany Carlson
It’s a great idea to use old clothes that can’t be put to goodwill or other institutions for a quilt – my mom did that for a dear friend of her: she made a quilt out of things of her friend’s mom who had passed away. The quilt turned out amazing and her friend cried when she got it – beautiful.
Have fun sewing it!
I love this idea. In fact, my husband had some old band t-shirts he wanted made into a quilt that I wrote about in my blog, until I got cyber stalked by some crazy tshirt collector guy who told me I was horrible for cutting up history or something. Scary.
Nevertheless, it’s a great reuse of something discarded that can once again have meaning and sentimentality to someone.
I did this with old jeans and flannel shirts. Check it out:
http://halleshobbies.blogspot.com/2008/09/ragtime-quilt-complete.html
Have fun making yours!!