A Holiday Quilt

One thing I love about visiting my mother (aside from the fact that I get to chat to her till all hours and spend time with her), is going through her material stash. She was into recycled crafting before I even knew about it. She has an entire caravan full of cut up second hand clothes, unwound jumpers, and bits and pieces she has spent years collecting. At one point, she was very into making crazy patchwork quilts. Some time I will have to take some pics of her quilts to put up here, they really are amazing.

This time though, I had a specific project in mind. Several years ago, when I moved into my first apartment on my own, we made a blue and green velvet patchwork lap rug. DD loves it, and carries it around the house to play with. I would rather it was left on her bed, covering up the board between hers and mine, so she didn't hit her head on it! The only solution was to make another rug! This time, of course, pink!

The material used is velvet, mostly from old velvet dressing gowns, which were all the fashion there at one stage. Mum has quite a collection, with lots of great colours for this project. We added in some purple and orange as well, just so it wasn't quite so pink. All red tones though.

DD had a lot of fun playing with the pieces, and some old dolly pegs that she found in a box of toys/craft stuff my mum had there.

Eventually we rescued the pieces to lay them out in a good order. It took lots of re-arranging so that we didn't have too similar a squares right together, although really, it probably didn't matter.

Then sewing them up. It's really handy to have two people for this job, as one can sew, while the other keeps the pieces in the right order. In a random design like this though, it really doesn't matter that much.

And here it is, the finished product! We found a piece of polar fleece left over from some tracksuit sewing we did for DD several visits ago for the backing. It was thick enough that we didn't need wadding, which was an added bonus. Then we gave it a quick wash, and here it is hanging in the sun. A good day's work I think.