Mary Mayne’s Scrap Bag

For those who don’t know me, my career in patchwork started in the early 1960s and involved a bag full of scraps left over from my dressmaking days. My first attempt at patchwork was a total disaster, as I thought I was preparing hexagons ready for a quilt or cushion. When I came to sew them together, however, I found I had prepared a carrier bag full of octagons, so they wouldn’t go together as planned! Despite this, I decided to add small 1in squares in-between the octagons as “fillers”. This gave me a piece of work large enough to go on a single bed, and the blue squares made long lines of colour through the octagons, which looked quite nice. This work was never finished or quilted and eventually