Sew Sunday - Upcylced Baby Quilt

I hesitate to use the word 'upcycle' in this way, as the quilt I 'upcycled' wasn't useless or destroyed, until I destroyed it.  Maybe 'recycled' is a more appropriate term.  Either way - I took and old quilt and made it new.

This quilt was made for my son by a 15 year old neighbor girl.  She gave it to him on his first birthday in 1985, and said she had worked on it for a year.  Quite an accomplishment for a 15 year old.

My intent was to repair this quilt and give it to my son's baby.  The quilt has a variety of materials used from sheets to velvet.  It has been well loved.  On closer inspection of the quilt I saw that the repairing was going to be too extensive.

She had mostly hand pieced the squares, and tied the quilt together.  Some fabrics were thread bare and there were rips in the back.

I decided instead to carefully deconstruct the quilt and use some of the old pieces with a combination of new ones to make a new quilt.  The deconstruction was nights sitting on the sofa carefully seam ripping, cutting, and picking.

I chose a palette of new fabrics that I thought complimented the original quilt - I wanted to keep the integrity of the original in tact and the color composition similar.

I ended up pulling the owl print shown.  I cut squares 3 1/2" (but not before cutting a whole quilts worth 3" ),

after measuring squares in the original and deciding to cut them down after picking them out to match the 6 1/2" blocks made with these new squares.

 I made 4 patches with the new fabrics and trimmed up 4 patches from the original.

I put together rows that had a combination of new and old.

The new baby quilt looks so similar to the old baby quilt.

Now on to quilting before this baby gets here!