My most embarrassing roadside find

I'm not one to pass a hard waste collection without looking.  I have been known to rearrange car seats to fit in furniture, rope in passers by to help me lift things into the boot, and even to partially dismantle furniture in order to fit it into my station wagon.  However, as I was inspecting my latest pick-up a couple of months ago I felt that I'd reached hither-to unseen levels of embarrassment for my family (I even felt a tinge of it myself).  The reason?  I'd never picked up fabric off the side of the road before, what I was picking up looked like someone's painting drop sheets at first glance, and I was picking it up literally around the corner from our house.  I can see their place from my bedroom window, and it felt just a tad close to home.  The prize?  A mint-condition (once they were washed) set of king size Sheridan sheets.

By way of background, I'd been looking for a grey fabric as backing to this quilt top, but to no avail.  I wanted something with a bit of a fleck to it, rather than solid grey, and was discovering that grey is not exactly popular at present.  The plan was to applique an Eiffel tower onto it to make the quilt truly reversable.  Even from the car, the colour of these sheets were enough to make me stop on my way home and check them out.  They proved to be unaffected by paint, or anything else that I could work out.

In the end I changed my mind a little, and have managed to produce this doona cover for the Schoolboy from the flat sheet:

A little patching was required on the back, covered by some strategically placed red stripes:

I made the matching pillowslip from the leftovers, cut the back of the quilt from the fitted sheet (even this showed no signs of wear - I'm assuming the grey didn't fit with their newly-renovated interior any longer), and have some fabric left over for another project.  Not bad for 3 minutes of cringing by the side of the road!

Postscript:

• The Schoolboy's declared this the best and most comfortable doona ever, but is consistently sleeping with the Eiffel tower facing down?!?
• The Kinderboy's now decided that he needs a black doona cover with a Kiwi on it.
• I'm wondering if either of them realize that we're Australian!