Just in case you were wondering where I’d got to, I’ve been a little busy, preparing firsrtly for tonight’s Transition Wimborne meeting (7.00 pm at the CLaRC) secondly for Saturday’s Bournemouth Vintage Fayre and thirdly for the Dorset County Show on Sunday where I’ll be demonstrating something (not 100% sure what yet) with my Guild, the Dorset Weavers, Spinners & Dyers. So I’ve been polishing up some of my little old beauties in the hope that they’ll find themselves loving new homes, and using up some of my bountiful supplies of reclaimed fabric & yarns. I now have 3 “Extreme Crochet” shawls to offer, including one that I’m tempted to keep, but musn’t as I already have too many shawls!
And then there’s the quilt/bedspread/throw… I was given a 1970’s duvet cover by its original maker, who told me to “make something with it!” She’d got some way through making a Grandmother’s Flower Garden hexagonal quilt & got bored, so she appliquéd it to a candy-pink polycotton duvet cover, which had become bobbly & worn over the years. But the patchwork was still in pretty good condition, so I cut it off the polycotton and appliquéd it onto some red velvet which came from a pair of gigantic curtains that smelt somehow of hotel – well-washed, of course! – and “tied” it with snippets of old lace. It wouldn’t have looked right just plonked onto the velvet, so I framed it with some deep modern lace I was given on Freecycle.
That sounds straightforward, but until you’ve painstakingly stitched around the outside of several hundred little hexagons, you don’t realise quite how fiddly it is! But the end result is quite stunning, IMHO, as a bedspread or as a throw; I just wonder whether anyone will want to buy it…
A recycled lifestyle... 
Good idea with the lace and velvet. I know 3 people with hexes to finish; I’ll mention your idea to them.
Hope all went well at the fairs 🙂