People Quilt

Isn't it fun when you're tidying things away, and you find something you haven't seen in a while. This is one of those things. It's Amy's travel 'People Quilt'.

When Amy was a baby, I made up two cot (or crib) quilts for her. One was a panel featuring some cute characters, one of whom you see in the picture. The panel had a cute backing fabric, and I thought it too cute to hide on a back, so it became a quilt too. Each cot quilt was bordered in broderie anglaise lace. As Amy was growing up, she couldn't sleep without the quilts, as she would rub the lace between her thumb and forefinger when she was going to sleep. As she learned to speak, she called the quilts her 'People Quilts' because the little characters were people to her. Even after she moved into a big girls bed, these quilts were still such a comfort to her, and they had to be with her all the time (except school of course, because that's just not cool!).

Fast forward a few years, and Amy and I were planning a holiday to the US with my friend and her daughter. My dilemma: Amy needed her People Quilt, but I didn't really want take up so much space packing it. Solution: I made a travel size quilt with a leftover piece of the backing fabric, and a piece of the leftover lace that I luckily still had.

You can see the quilt in the picture of the two of us here - we're at the San Diego Zoo. I have such memories of this tiny quilt - it was lost in the breakfast room of our hotel, and found and kindly returned in superfast time by the staff. It was lost in the Disneyland Hotel when we had breakfast with the characters. We ran back and found it luckily! It was also lost in Snoopy's planes at Knott's Berry Farm. We figured out where it was and the attendant kindly tracked it down for us.

The cot quilts are long gone - they fell to pieces in time, but I feel sure this tiny quilt will be with us forever, it's been through so much already! Eventually Amy outgrew it, but there is no way I'll ever be parting with it, for me it's such a lovely reminder of how something so small can mean so much to a darling little person.