Repairing the Vintage Star Quilt
When I received this beautifully hand pieced and hand quilted quilt, I couldn't wait to get started on it!
I started this quilt by hand washing it in my bathtub to remove the water marks, the large stain and to brighten it up. I also wanted to clean it up before I started repairing it so that I could match fabric as closely as I could when patching the large hole that a mouse chewed the whole wa
I was so pleased that I could get most of the large stain out! (You can't get all of the old out of an old quilt, and I am not sure that you would want to!)
The water mark stains and other lighter stains came out in the hand washing as well.
I repaired the large hole by adding some batting to fill the space and interfacing to stabilize the fabric to keep it from fraying. Then I hand sewed a patch over the hole on the front and the back. After the patches were in place, I hand quilted over the patches following the existing quilting so the at patches would blend into the quilt. Can you see the patches?
Look closely for the patch!
I then repaired other little holes and missing seams by hand sewing them closed.
I go over the quilt "with a fine tooth comb" to find and repair all these little holes.
There was a lot of quilting missing all along the edge of the quilt. So I hand quilted back in all of the missing quilting.
Before putting an new binding on the edge of the quilt, I added some interfacing to stabilize the fabric along the edge of the quilt where the fabric had become very thin.
Interesting side note: See the little brown dots in the original batting of the quilt? Those are cotton seed hulls. The introduction of the cotton gin (short for cotton engine) a machine used to separate cotton from its seeds,
With the permission from the owner of the quilt, I replaced the old binding around the edge of the quilt with brand new blue binding that matched the fabric in the star. The owner and I agreed that this helped the star "pop". I hand sewed the binding on.
The quilt is finished!!
This is a slow and very time consuming process, but the end results are well worth the effort!
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