I made this rug exactly two years ago when I was decorating Lily's  'nursery' (otherwise known as the corner of our bedroom). I had wanted to make a rug that was girly without actually being pink, or for that matter red and white. So, quite unusually for me at the time, I chose orange as the main colour and teamed it with red and just a tiny bit of pink.

The orange and grey fabric is one of my all time favourites - Forest Pods by Amy Butler. I only have a few small pieces, no actual yardage, that I bought when I was only holiday in New York before I had Lily. It felt very fitting to use it, because I bought it at the time when Jim and I had decided to try for another baby after all the miscarriages. The rest of the fabrics are a mix of Amy Butler, Moda and Kaffe Fassett, with a Denyse Schmidt thrown in for good measure. And for the border I've used a natural linen, that I've hand stitched, with a thick embroidery thread. I think I sort of had a woven look in mind, rather than an embroidery look.

When the rug was in Lily's part of the room it took up most of the floor space, so suffered a lot of foot fall. Especially those first few weeks before we got her dairy allergy figured out and would spend most to the nights walking her up and down. So in the hopes of making it a little more practical than a normal quilt would be, as well as using wool batting I backed it and bound it in a really good strong canvas.

Of course Lily moved in to the girl's shared room a year ago, and since then the rug has been buried under an annoyingly huge pile of debris that has taken over one end of our bedroom - which by the way is destined to become a beautiful and comfortable reading corner, one day.  Really, it is!

So when I rediscovered it a couple of weeks ago I was able to look at it afresh and realised that it would look perfect in the kitchen. Especially as Lily has such a love of playing with her dolls on the kitchen floor, which I worry is a little cold for her.

I have to say as well, that although it's getting a lot of harder wear, with dirty boots and food being spilt etc, it seems to be coping pretty well. It would of course, cope even better if I could get our cat to wipe his paws before he came in!