Works of Our Customers

The photos of this art quilt were sent in by Karyn Meyreles. Karyn is a member of American Sewing Guild, Gold Country Chapter (Placerville, CA). She made this wall hanging for a Denim Challenge in her guild. Karyn has not only made a remarkable project, but also sent in an interesting story about how she was working on it. Here is what she writes:

"First, I got a bunch of old jeans from a guild member’s husband. As I pondered about an idea for my denim challenge project all I could think about was the jeans and how hard someone must have worked while wearing them and if only some jeans could talk! Imagine what they have been around to see since they are so durable and don’t seem to wear out. One pair could have seen a lot!
Out of that thinking came the idea for my wall hanging project entitled “ Jeans – as Durable as our Progressive Dreams”. I just figured jeans have been around to ride on horses, sit upon a covered wagon, catch a ride in a horseless carriage, lean against a rusty old car, build and ride along the rails of a locomotive and maybe even ride in a lunar car on the moon; with always the same durability as the dreams it took to create all these possibilities. So, I decided to take all these old jeans to create each of these different images and collage them together. I went in search of already digitized designs that would convey my message that could be used with some work I had already done.

" The horses, covered wagon, carriage car, locomotive and lunar car are all stitched using the embroidery unit on my home sewing machine with the digitized designs I purchased from various companies. There are over 240,000 stitches in just these designs alone. The sunset and rusted car door are designs that I personally free motion stitched on my sewing machine using a technique I learned in a class with Carol Shinn, a photo realist embroidery artist. One article written about her states “ Carol’s embroideries are a study in the complex and minute details it is possible to render in thread”. I learned great techniques in this class and machine-stitched these two designs on separate pieces of old jeans in the class. The rusted out car is actually on two different pieces of jeans with one piece of the car showing through a hole in the jeans. The sunset is stitched in three sections on the front of jeans with one part on the inner portion of the front pocket and the other two parts on each side of the front zipper. I can’t even begin to tell you how many stitches are these two designs."

"For the Guild's denim challenge I thought I should take the two finished free motion designs and expand on it to show how jeans have been around for a long time and no doubt involved in all our dreams. I had learned how to free motion stitch embroidered items to have it look just like a photo image; I wanted to see how the embroidery done on an embroidery machine with digitized designs would compare while at the same time conveying a message. The digitized designs I chose for the wall hanging express the progress of our dreams as best I could imagine. I felt proud when I realized that my work in class was as good as any digitized design and I had done it with free motion thread play. I joined all the pieces of jeans with the varied designs depicting the progress so you could view them while having visions of jeans as part of that progress. I felt the worn nature of the jeans expressed how it must have been difficult to accomplish some of these dreams and hard work must have prevailed. Jeans are just as durable as we are in making our dreams come true."

"This wall hanging proudly hangs on my living room wall here in Rancho Murieta, California (outside of Sacramento) where I reside. Everyone who sees this wall hanging just marvels at the concept that it promotes and the stitching involved. I truly love how it turned out!"

We love it too! Thank you for sharing!