An old quilt goes to the hospital

A good friend of mine asked me to repair her old family quilt. I am no expert but I did the best I could with mixed results.

Following are several before and after pictures and some of the challenges of working on an older quilt.

This first one was just reinforced with some Fray Check. It was still wet when I took this photo but when it dried, you couldn't see the 'wet' spot any longer: 

 

This one was approached differently. I first tried to just patch the hole with some fabric and stitching. I didn't like the look of it so I redid two of the diamonds in a complementary brown:

 

There were many areas that the fabrics had just come apart and I mended them as best I could.

  

This one was also repaired by replacing two of the diamonds:

   

I replaced all four diamonds on this one. Although it might not look like it, they were all so threadbare that I knew they wouldn't last much longer without replacing.

  

There were many many places that the hand quilting had started to come undone. I re-quilted them, all by hand.

   

This is another one where I replaced all the diamonds.

  

Matching old faded fabrics to new ones was quite a challenge!

  

Sometimes I just used a blue that worked fine when replacing all the diamonds.

 

This one was probably the worst one I worked on.

 

Yet another one with all new diamonds.

    

This one had edges that were in really bad shape and they were all replaced.

 

Here is an example of one of many spots that had to be re-sewn.

 

I forgot to take a before photo of some of these blocks. You can hardly tell but there were spots in the dark blue that were faded to almost white. I used some fabric paint to touch up the spots so they didn't show up as much.

  When all the repairs were done on the blocks, I began the work on the border and binding.

Originally I was going to cover over the red and use it for binding too. I bought some red fabric and pre-washed it with color catchers, over and over again. In the second photo you can still see that the red was transferring to a white on white print when it was ironed with steam. After talking with the owner of the quilt, it was decided to not use the red and take the chance of it ruining the old quilt.

 

In studying the binding I found it had originally been made by bringing the backing over and machine sewing it down. The backing was super thin fabric and it had completely frayed all along the edge.

I very carefully removed the fabric along the edge and trimmed back the rotting material.

I used a narrow white binding and sewed it down to re-enclose the edge. It made the red strip more narrow but still captured the look of the original design.

This was truly a labor of love. It was fascinating to me to see how it had been worked on. There were many many inconsistencies in the stitches. Some of the quilting was made with tiny stitches and some had huge stitches. It makes me think there were more quilters than one, working on it. 

All in all, I am pleased with how it turned out. I hope I've given it more time for the owner to enjoy! 

Thank you for looking at all the photos. If there are any that you want to see in more detail, you can just click on it and you'll see a closer image to study.

Until next time, happy crafting!