The heart of my all time favourite throw started life as a brocade floor length skirt found in a local charity shop. Looked to me like something from the sixties or seventies and when my friend saw me with it she wanted half so I ended up with the back piece which was basically two pieces with the zip and a long opening in the middle. I had been collecting fabric for about a year since purchasing the first Kaffe Fassett hard cover book on quilting and have long been a fan of Kaffe since the early nineties when I discovered his wonderful designs and radical ideas for knitting via Glorious Knitting and Glorious Colour.
His astonishingly beautifully photographed book on quilting just mesmerized me and I spent many months drinking in his truly glorious colours and original takes on this traditional craft. After purchasing the skirt I realised that all I needed were a few selected greens and then I would have enough to get going on this throw. I had been collecting brocade from sample books for some years and had really wanted to replicate the colourway of the throw in the book, however when I found the skirt something clicked and I knew it would work with everything I had been collecting, just in case, for a few years.
I had a large piece of Liberty of London upholstery weight fabric that I used as a border for a door curtain so the hunt was on for the remaining pieces of that. Also from the charity shop was a formal shirt in gold silk brocade so I added that to the pile as well. Recently I had found some fabric samples from a new range in Spotlight [Australia's Joanne's] which were very deeply textured and patterned and also had some deep red jacquard which I had bought as a remnant. All I needed for the rest of the throw were the 30cm squares which I had been collecting for some years of gorgeous brocade samples in golds and reds and greens and some red floral fabric which I had bought several weeks before.
Once I started cutting out and arranging the top it was very quick to come together….I was held up for a few days when i realised that I needed another floral of some sort……. knew I had just the thing…somewhere and had to search the garage for them. The overall design was very easy and as a lot of the samples already had overlocking around them that saved me a lot of time, upholstery fabric frays a lot and requires some kind of stitching either before sewing the seam or after you see. Once I added a border, which Kaffe was not always adding in those days, it seemed to really finish off the top perfectly.
A week or so earlier Spotlight had just introduced a divine chenille….darkest red with gold swirls throughout…I just had to have it for the backing even though it was about $30 all told. That’s a lot for me as I usually use thrifted fabric or sale fabric for backings. this was going to be a leess expensive option anyway as I did not need wadding or batting inside the two layers as the chenille was so thick and heavy. I had been drooling over several throws at Laura Ashley and I was so excited by this chenille as it as even more lush than the ones in that store.
I slip stitched the border to the backing fabric and then top stitched around the inner border. It has been three years now of fairly constant display and during that time it has faded slightly so that it looks truly vintage…I even washed it once in case the dreaded mould had infected it and it came up better than new. After a few months I made a few companion cushions with some of the remaining skirt brocade and a tiny little piece of embroidered silk that as it was $185 a metre was all I could afford! The minimum cut was 30cm and I made every centimetre count! It is well placed I think in the heart of the brocade…..I think the woman who wore that skirt would wear something made out of that silk today…a little bit goes a long way and both the silk and the brocade are truly the stars of this throw!
