School Spirit Quilt

My youngest child has a favorite quilt.  It's not the nice one that my mom made for him, it's one that is falling apart and has so many patches, I've started to patch the patches.  My sister made me this quilt when I graduated from high school.  I used it on my dorm room bed during college.  Neither of the other kids were interested in it at all, but Daniel decided this was HIS quilt.  When he comes downstairs in the morning he has it wrapped around himself.  It's spread out on the family room floor and used as a raft, etc, etc.  I'm saving the original to show you at the end of this post ( I don't want to scare you away)

The quilt is made from bandanas.  I found these in a craft store near Cleveland called Pat Catan's.  Purple and Yellow!  Our school colors.  How perfect - I could see a new quilt developing. 

I used 3 bandanas in each row and made 5 rows, alternating purple and yellow.  I must warn you if you try this, the bandanas were not all the same size - wonderful!  That made the sewing of the rows together interesting.  

The backing is 5 rows of flannel, I used purple and a mottled yellow, 3 purple rows and 2 yellow rows. I wish I could say they matched up perfectly at the edges to the width of the bandanas, but they didn't.  The recipient hasn't complained yet.    

I used one layer of warm and natural as the batting.  Simply laid out the backing and front, right sides together with the batting on the bottom and sewed almost all the way around, just leaving an opening so I could turn the whole thing right side out.  

I tied this quilt - on each corner, in the middle and halfway between the corners.  The last thing that I did was stitch the opening closed.  

Now, the photo of the original - it started out with gray and maroon bandanas.  You can see I had to stitch white and black ones onto the top to cover the old ones.  The top left bandana is gone and the batting is exposed as is the middle one on the bottom.  When I mentioned that I could now throw this one away  since there's a replacement, I got a very firm "NO".  

Hope you are having a good weekend.  ~Ann