A Quilt Challenge for Family

This past summer, my aunt contacted me with a picture and a request. My cousin Dawn loves this blanket that she’s had since childhood, and my aunt wondered if I could transform it into something usable.

Let’s talk about this blanket, which is more like a comforter from the early 90’s. The fabric is a polyester blend, and was soooooo thin it was barely there. Some of the fabric was torn and bad, but this balloon design was essentially both sides of the comforter.

I took it apart to remove the polyfil batting. But the fabric was so thin, I was worried just quilting it would not stabilize it enough.

That’s where Power Boost Interlining came in. It fused beautifully to the fabric, and prevented it from stretching any during quilting.
There was a decent amount of fabric I could save, so now the challenge was how to use it all. Of course, one of the largest pieces became a small lap quilt. Those dark lines are where the original comforter stitching was!

Now back to the batting. When my sister needed to save her baby quilt from shredding even further, I found a small amount of similar fabric and made a pillow so she could put her blanket scraps inside and save them but still have them. I decided to do something similar with a couple of scraps of the balloon fabric!

I shredded the matted polyfil batting into pieces to stuff into one of the pillows. The other, I made into a zippered pillow in which the rest of the fabric and batting piece went, so that if down the road my cousin wanted to make something else from the fabric, she could. It’s like a fabric safe to keep those pieces close by.

My cousin loves the final results and sewing this family project really got me out of a sewing slump this summer!