Horse Quilt and The Quilt Inside It
This horse and covered wagon patterned whole cloth quilt was my customer's Dad's childhood quilt. She wanted the very lumpy batting replaced and put back together as close to the original as possible. Based on the weight and lumpiness, I thought that this quilt had been made by covering an old blanket or quilt with the horse fabric. I couldn't wait to see what was inside! In addition to the bat
I started to take apart my customer's quilt to replace the batting and I found another quilt!
I finished taking the horse patterned fabric off and this was the quilt that was inside the horse quilt. I think this is so cool-- it's like uncovering another treasure!
Side note: It was common during the Depression era to make new quilts by using an old quilt or blanket as the batting.
It had been repaired before it was made into the horse patterned quilt. The long pink pieces on each end of the quilt was covering worn patchwork. Look what I found when I lifted them up!
After taking it all apart, I carefully washed and ironed the front and the back of the horse patterned quilt to get rid of the dust and lint that was all over it from taking it apart. I then trimmed the worn edges of the quilt off and squared it up.
Using the best pieces left over from trimming the edges, I patched the holes. I put a piece of fusible interfacing behind each hole to hold it togethe
These two collage pictures show the hole, the hole with the interfacing on behind it, then a picture of the patched hole and a pic of exactly where the patch is circled. I tried to very hard to choose sections of fabric from the trimmed edges that would blend well so you couldn't see them. The pictures show the holes close up and look bigger than they actually are.
After all the repairs were finished, I "sandwiched" the front, batting, and backing and sewed it back together and quilted it. Then I took it outside for a picture!
I absolutely love how it came back together! It is fluffy and more like a comforter than a quilt-- which was exactly what my customer wanted!
My customer wanted the quilt inside the quilt and asked if it was in good enough shape to save. There were some good patches and a lot of patches that have literally disintegrated. I cut out all of the good pieces and washed them. There were enough good patches to make a table runner or a small lap quilt. My customer decided on the small lap quilt.
The quilt inside the quilt is called a "Crazy Quilt". That means that you take a basket full of scrap fabrics of all shapes, sizes colors and patterns reach in and sew on what you pull out.
Even though it's a crazy quilt and it's supposed to be random, but since I had a number of limited pieces I puzzled them together in a layout and tried to make the columns the same length.
My customer approved t
Since these pieces were fragile, I pieced then together by using the foundation piecing method. I used fusible interfacing as the backing to have something stable to sew on and then pieced it together on top of the interfacing. After all the pieces were sewn together into the column, I ironed it to fuse the interfacing to the fabric. This will make the fragile fabric last longer.
After the columns were sewn together and and squared up, I used the long pieces that were at the top and bottom of the original quilt that covered the worn pieces to use as a double border around the quilt. I used brand new fabric for the back of the quilt that matched the color of the backing of the original quilt. Then I machine quilted it together. (Machine quilting is much stronger and more ef
A close up of the quilt!
Another close up picture of the finished quilt.
I love the way the quilting looks on the back of the quilt too!!