TIFC - February - Post 1

So.... on to February. The TIFC challenge for February is:

"What are you old enough to remember?"

Hmm....seems simple enough, but when it comes down to it, I guess I am not as old as I currently feel (!) because there are a lot of thing I can't remember! Like......Armstrong landing on the moon (I was around, but only just), the Vietnam War, Elvis' death, Apollo 13, the sacking of Whitlam's government....

Anyway, after some brainstorming with my husband (and my friend Google), I decided the earliest world events I can actually remember (as opposed to things I know about and feel I should remember) are from 1975/1976. I can remember a few personal things from before that time - like a couple of birthday cakes, going to kindergarten, my sister starting prep class - but I cannot accurately date those because they are mainly just snippets of memories, all jumbled in my mind.

Here are 2 pages from my visual journal showing things I can remember. I decided I'd take a time frame of about 1975 to 1981 - anything after that is not classified as an "early memory"! (That means I didn't have to mention frills and ruffles and flicked back fringes here.)

I don't think this really gets me too far forward on a design concept. The one thing that is coming to mind is the idea of the early quilting era. I remember in the early 1980s quilting was not really a popular hobby in Australia. A quilt shop opened in Yankalilla near our beachhouse and my Mum and I liked to go there sometimes. I remember just about all the fabric was russet colored (like the russet in the challenge colors this month - is it a coincidence?!). In those early days quilting was more traditional: pieced samplers, English patchwork done with paper templates inside.....

Once I started thinking about that it gave me a seed of an idea so after wrestling my "don't use this stuff very often" sewing boxes out of the cupboard and ferreting around in them for a while, I found a plastic bag of old patchwork bits and pieces my sister and I made at our beachhouse sometime in the early 1980s. I thought that maybe I could use one of these odd pieces somehow, but after having a look at them, I am not so sure. I knew they were not exactly trendy, but somehow in my mind they seemed better than they actually turned out to be. The best of the lot is this one:
But it really does beg the question how this (well, part of it if I am going to keep to my 5.5" x 7" format) could be used, modernized, tissied up. I mean, how could one ever tie those florals together into something coherent? I think my only excuse for this creation is that I was a child at the time (which makes it a good effort, albeit a very unattractive one).

If anyone can think of a way to use this in an updated form, please let me know! Otherwise, I think it is back to the drawing board, although I am still toying with the idea of English style patchwork, even if it is to recreate a small piece of hexagon patchwork, just to feel again how it is done. It must be more than 25 years since I last tried it!