When my mother passed away in 2019 and we had to dissolve the household, I found a patchwork project between her handicrafts stuff. I cannot remember that I ever saw her working on this, but I remember a lot of the fabrics from old family photos from the 60s. There were also some fabrics from which she had made dresses for my sister and me. I am usually not making patchwork or quilting, but I could not bring myself to throw this piece away. So I took it with me, together with the cardboard template and some fabric scraps that were stashed away with the blanket. Some were already cut out.
Some of the fabric was really old and thin. And look at this part of a sleeve which was mended carefully…
I decided relatively quickly that I wanted to make it into a bedspread for our guest bed. This is the size the blanket had when I found it:
I added 7 rows in total to get the required size. I used as much of the old fabric as possible, but I did have to add some scraps from my own stash. In order to keep the transition as unobtrusive as possible, I added rows to both sites of the quilt.
The next step was cutting the bottom and adding the batting. For the bottom layer, I used linen that I had in my stash (I once bought 10m of it with the idea of making medieval clothing. This never happened and I now use the fabric for all sorts of projects). The batting is a cotton wool blend from Hobbs Tuscany Collection. I did internet research, and this seemed to be suitable for my purpose.
Our living room was the only place with enough space to arrange all layers and start basting them together.
First pinning,
then basting.
After I had basted all layers together, I thought I had accomplished most of the work. I was not aware that quilting the layers together on a household sewing machine is no fun. I did not attempt to quilt a pattern, but just sewed in the ditch between the squares. It was very tiresome to handle all that fabric and I could only sew so much at a time.
So I was very happy when the quilting was finally finished. For the binding, I just folded the bottom layer over the edge. Here is the finished quilt.
I am happy how this piece of memory turned out in the end. But I also know, I will never quilt a bedspread again.
