Textiles: Lessons from an old Blue Quilt - Part 1

When I stayed at my grandmother's house as a little girl, I slept under this quilt. It and another quilt were supposed to have been made by a woman in my family. They're both 'one-patch' quilts with a plain coloured border, i.e. they each use only one shape, here hexagons and in the other, oblongs. Neither of them has any wadding or quilting, so when I started to make patchwork in the days before it became fashionable again, I didn't quilt anything either! As there were unfinished quilt pieces lying around my grandmother's house, too, I copied my ancestor-quilter's method (which was English piecing) and made everything over papers - even log cabin, which was immensely boring and quite unsuccessful. Later on I found books, exhibitions and other quilters, but in the mid-seventies all I had for guidance was this poor old quilt, which had suffered when patchwork dropped out of fashion, being used as a dustsheet and collecting paint and varnish stains. I always imagined the woman who made it designed it herself and used scraps of her own fabric, but a couple of years ago I came across a very similar quilt in a charity sale: the same hexagon pattern with a central rosette, the same blue border, etc. That made me wonder if it was made from a kit, or copied from a design in a newspaper.