My 2025 #QuiltConCouture

If you’ve been to QuiltCon (the annual show of the national Modern Quilt Guild) in the past couple years, you’ve likely seen an explosion of quilty fashion: quilt coats, patchwork dresses, clothes visibly mended & upcycled with patchwork & embroidery, and of course, LOTS of custom bags!

I knew I wanted some fresh quilty fashion for this year’s show, and I’m absolutely thrilled with what I created. I’ve continued to wear & use these items since I got home!

1) Breathing Time Machine jeans

These ultra low rise Gap jeans from the late 90’s had already been well-loved and patched up. I did my first visible mending with sashiko-inspired stitching on the knees in 2019 (had to go back through the instagram archives!), but they hadn’t fit me in a really long time. I’m in a pretty good place with my body as it is now, but I also really loved these jeans, so I decided to give them new life with side panels. Of course, I couldn’t possibly just put other denim or yardage in the panels! It absolutely had to be patchwork of some sort.

I’d been planning to quilt a favorite Avett Brothers lyric using Carolyn Friedlander’s Alphabet pattern, but hadn’t decided whether it’d go on a bag, or become a wall hanging, or something else - turns out, my jeans were the perfect project! I dove into my green & blue scraps to make the letters, and then used some cotton I’d indigo-dyed with Kim Eichler-Messmer at Slow Stitching retreats the past couple summers to build out the length of the panels. The panels are lined and very lightly quilted just to stabilize all the tiny pieces. The lining is mostly a scrap of a 108” wide remnant I picked up a while back (wideback remnants are always handy!); I knew I’d likely wear them cuffed, so I added some dark blue Starry to the bottom of the lining.

I loosely used this DIY blog post to guide me. I discovered that post-panels, the waist is too big, so I may add some elastic, but the interim solution - wearing a pair of high rise bike shorts underneath - actually works pretty well to both hold them up and make the low-rise aspect a little less risqué.

I’ll definitely be wearing these when we go see the Avetts at Red Rocks this summer!

2) Patchwork Totepack (photos from instagram because I was on a roll!)

I’d been meaning to make a Totepack (pattern from Sewing Through Fog) for a while, and I knew from past QuiltCons that a roomy, hands-free tote would be really useful. The totepack is roomy AND easily converts from traditional handles to a backpack! I tweaked the pattern a little bit to have a set-in fully enclosing zipper and went LOUD with the fabrics. Radha’s pattern for this bag is fantastic - there are SO many options in it and ideas for how to use upcycled materials & things you already have - it’s like a choose your own adventure pattern. It was fantastic for air travel and wandering the QuiltCon vendor halls alike.

3) Omega patchwork shell jacket

Ok, y’all. This one almost did me in. I unfortunately finished my totepack and jeans with about 48 hours to spare before leaving for Phoenix…juuuust enough time for an ambitious bonus project. I timed it impeccably or terribly, depending on how you look at it.

The jacket? cardigan? shell? pattern is semi-self-drafted. A few years ago I found this jacket-type thing at Target that I loved the shape of, but didn’t love the fabric. I bought it, thinking I’d evaluate at home with the rest of my wardrobe. Still didn’t like it. So I traced the pieces onto paper, returned it, and jotted down some notes as I reverse engineered my own from a black & white linen.*

The patchwork blocks are all made from fabrics I had on hand - mostly linen, remnants, leftovers from other projects, and at least one men’s dress shirt. Getting it finished required some marathon sewing that meant I wore my TENS unit on the plane to soothe my spasming back muscles, but it was worth it!

If you want to see more cool QuiltConCouture (say that 3 times fast?!), check out @themqg on Instagram. Also - check out Radha’s amazing patchwork denim skirt shown in her blog post!!

*I wore it at QuiltCon 2024 in Raleigh!