patchwork and me

I started making sheety when I was 13 after reading about how to do English style patchwork in this book:



It was my sister's book and I just adored it. All those cool girls doing surfing and rounders and bushcraft and collecting butterflies. I found a copy in an op shop a couple of years ago and had to snap it up.

Anyway, it took me about four years to finish queen sized bed sheety, all sewn by hand and then I sewed cotton lawn on the back. It is a really nice thing to sleep under in summer and now thirty years later is faded and tattered and I look at all the hexagons and see bits from dressmaking projects I made at school, a bit of my old high school dress, material from my grandmother who made so many of our clothes when we were growing up. Much of the fabric is from the seventies and very, very groovy. It is completely the opposite of the beautiful, technically perfect quilts people make with new fabric all matched and sewn on machines. My kids want me to make them one each for their beds and I think I'll start this winter. I may have finished by the time they leave home.

This funny old piece of my history really is the thing I would grab in a fire.

I've also made cushions with this method and in 2008 a crazy enormous tablecloth with a square for every day of that year. It looks like a bed quilt but is nice covering the dining table on occasion.This is not used every day for eating, (maybe once a week though when we have an extra one or two) but largely for storing things I should have put elsewhere, and sometimes for homework. I have been meaning to clear this table since Monday morning, yes now it is Thursday. This is what it looks like:


Not very tidy, that's me.