You probably couldn't have picked a finer challenge than to try to remember something from 35 years ago <g> and then select something that was probably someone's moment of ultimate creativity.
It sounds to me that you are about to embark on a career called "design" .. which is where all those patterns in books and magazines come from.
Always remember:
You are working with an inanimate object. As a human you have superiority over all inanimate objects. You can make most of them do whatever you want!
With that in mind, start drawing out your pattern the way you remember it, and then start making it fit the size of your target.
If you saw it done once, it can be accomplished again.
I hope you are correctly inspired to keep working at it, since you very much have just the right frame of mind to progress well into and through the quilting world.