Re-Purposed Dresses

My daughter wearing a dress given to her by her Samoan host family

When my daughter was in high school, she took a school-sponsored trip to Samoa where she stayed with a host family.  During her stay, they sewed and gave her several cotton dresses.  Now that she has graduated from college, my daughter has started going through her old things, deciding what to keep and what to donate to Goodwill.  Among the things she was ready to pass on were several of her Samoan outfits.

I know that she will likely never again wear these dresses, but it seemed hard to just give away such lovely gifts.  I decided I’d take one or two dresses and re-make the fabric into table runners and placemats, so that she can still have a keepsake of her trip, but in a usable form.  Here are the table linens I pieced from a blue print dress:

Pieced table runner and place mats from Samoan fabric

I used the “Safari” quilt block design that I found in the quilt book, New Cuts for New Quilts: More Ways to Stack the Deck by Karla Alexander.