The "pretty quilt"

It's not beautifully made and I'd never enter it in a quilt show, but making and using it gives me great pleasure. It's square and doesn't cover the pillows, and has lived on the bed for some years now; gives me joy when I smooth it down over the duvet every morning -

The back shows areas of uneven quilting, cobbled together from the patterns on the front, but I love to the see the contrast of "plain" back with the busy front as it gets put into place -

It started from the desire to make "something pretty" and some furnishing fabric samples, which were stretched out to quilt size with silks and linens from pre-worn garments. To stretch it further, I added some stripey yardage (possibly it contains some polyester) in and as borders and binding. And then the quilting fun began ... it's a skill I'm still learning, and this gave me quite a lot of practice -

What about that mixture of fabrics - heavyweight cotton, not-so-thick linens, and flimsy silk? We are definitely not advised to mix fabrics in bed quilts, oh no, those sorts of shenanigans are for wall quilts only. Yet our foremothers used what was to hand, as I did with this quilt - if, like many or most of their creations, it wears out within my lifetime, I have others to use instead. There's a heavy one made from corduroy trousers from Calgary thrift shops in - the date is on it - 1979. And the blue squares, used by my son and his friends as a picnic blanket, made in Cambridge in 1974, my second double-bed quilt - the first was sent to my parents after their house fire, and gave my mother work to add further borders as they had upsized to a much larger bed.

Nowadays I work small (if at all) - where are we supposed to keep all these huge things we make?