A second generation quilt

When I was a young teen, perhaps even twelve, my mother made me a patchwork blanket. I remember her making it quite clearly; cutting squillions of triangles by hand (no rotary cutter and mat!) and piecing them together in strips, then the strips into a blanket. My older sister had made a blanket for herself (with mum's help) and with the leftover triangles my sister had cut for her own blanket and quite a few more mum put the bits to good use and made a blanket for me.

In its 25 years (give or take) it has been loved through autumns and winters, draped around me for much of my two labours and wrapped both me and my newborns while we fed, slept and fell in love. It has been snuggled under with up to three puss cats at a time on top and even been used to build a few cubby houses.

It has been washed a few times and the red satin binding kind of fell apart and well, it was looking a bit tatty and it was made for a single bed not a queen - and my beloved and I seem to do a bit of tug-o-war with it in the wee small hours ...so - I pulled it apart (I have to say I am everso pleased that it was a blanket and not a quilt; imagine unpicking all that quilting!) - not the whole thing of course I just pulled off the binding, detached the batting and cut metres of extra seam allowance off the top back to 1/4"(I think she had made the whole thing with inch thick seams).

The tricky bit was then finding some fabric to do the new boarders and binding - I wanted to make it fit our queen bed - and there are just so many colours in the original. I went with blues. A dark blue stripe (on the bottom in the pic below) which I have cut to make a 2" small border to frame the original quilt and then the pale large blue floral (above the stripe) as a 6" border around that. I will use the stripe for the binding too.

I am using an old, pale yellow check Laura Ashley cotton sheet for the backing. It is possibly the first sheet my husband and I bought when we moved in together (when I was still a teen - only just!)

The wee girl has been sick with a nasty cold but by staying up very late last night and getting up quite early this morning (working like a mad woman in the few hours of sleep she has managed) I have finished the top and have iorned that and the backing so it is all ready for pinning together - I've got a lovely 100% cotton batting to go between).

I will have to move everything else out of the way so I can use the hard floor where the piano is to pin it together ready for quilting and I can only do that when a bebe will not be crawling about all over it. Then I am just going to quilt in the ditch - but will probably follow a diamond pattern I think.

So with any luck in the next week or so I will have a picture to show you... and my Mum.