Hetty, my mother and her mother used to do a quilt about twice a year. When we would come home from school, mom would say that "Grandma and her were going to do another quilt, and to clean out our closet." Since our clothes were all cotton material, it was easy since all they had to do was to wash it, cut the seams off, zippers out and buttons off (When there were some), and then decide what top they wanted to do and then cut the material into pieces as they needed them. They did not have a lot of log cabin pieces cut out or dresden plate pieces, they just left the pieces as big as possible and cut as needed. Mom had a large drawer that she could stuff the material she had, so she could save the material in an out of the way place. Mom always said that the quilts should be made out of all cotton, or if you were going to use another type of material, then the quilt had to be all the same for that quilt. Good luck!