Detour: Exploratory Vintage Quilt Surgery, Or What Have I Gotten Myself Into This Time?

This quilt belongs to a friend of mine from church choir.  It was made by her grandmother, she has had it since before she was married, and it holds a lot of special memories.  She brought it to me for advice on how she could repair it herself, but I offered to do it for instead.  I knew this was going to be a can of worms and I didn't want to tell someone who is not a quilter how to take apart a treasured quilt that she might not be able to get back together again.

Vintage Quilt Top On My Design Wall

There are several places where entire patches of fabric have shredded and disintegrated, and obviously those pieces of fabric need to be replaced.  However, although I'm dating the quilt to the late 1960s to 1970s based on the fabric styles and what I know of its history, all of the fabrics have been seriously compromised by UV damage due to the quilt being used regularly as a picnic blanket over the past few decades.  

Detail of Damaged Section

The original orange backing fabric is badly shredded and torn, and my friend is ready to give up the orange anyway, so my first step was to carefully clip off all of the yarn that tied the quilt layers together at 4" intervals and then remove the binding so I could discard the old batting and backing and get a better look at the condition of the quilt top.  It was amazing to see how much brighter and darker these fabrics once were, in places where the fabric was protected by the binding or in a seam allowance.

See the Color Difference Beneath the Binding?

The whole thing is really fragile and  even the fabrics that don't have any holes or tears yet are just a tug away from a rip.  I already told my friend that I think it needs to get quilted instead of just tied this time.  First of all, I don't know how to tie a quilt and I'm not really interested in learning.  But more importantly, I want to drastically reduce the amount of stress on these fragile quilt top fabrics as much as possible.  With a tied quilt, it's too easy to grab it, shift position if you're sitting on it, or whatever and end up tugging just at the top fabric because the layers are able to shift independently of one another.  I need to strengthen this quilt from the inside out.

Quilt Was Originally Tied at Four Inch Intervals

Speaking of the inside, look at the back of the quilt top once I separated it from the batting and backing:

Back of Quilt Top, With Mysterious Seams

I don't quite know what to make of it.  I mean, I can see that it's a utility scrap quilt kind of thing and the fabrics may be garment scraps and/or bed sheets as likely as quilting cottons. And I'd classify it as a crazy quilt construction, but it's not a block construction and I can't figure out where that square seam allowance came from in the middle of the foundation fabric.  Anyway, I've been mulling this all day and I think I need to carefully snip away as much of that white foundation fabric away as possible.  For one thing, it's shredding apart.  The quilt top fabrics also shrank at different rates from the foundation fabric, so it's sagging and bagging away from the quilt top and preventing it from lying flat.  More importantly, though, I've decided that the only way to extend the life of this quilt significantly is to reinforce the weak vintage fabrics so they don't keep ripping, and I'm going to do that by fusing Jenny Haskin's Sheer Magic embroidery stabilizer to the back of the quilt top.  This product was designed for machine embroidery on delicate silk fabrics, and it's great because it's soft and filmy like a chiffon and doesn't change the hand of the fabric you're fusing it to.  I'm hoping the Sheer Magic will lend invisible strength to the quilt top fabrics even before I quilt them to new batting and backing.

Giant Hole to Repair Revealing Ripped Foundation Fabric Beneath

In the meantime, every time I handle or move this quilt top I hear another rip coming from somewhere.  Just its own weight is enough to rip it!  And if it's that fragile now, it' going to be even worse with the foundation fabric removed.  Maybe I ought to do that in sections, remove a big area of backing, fuse stabilizer to that section, and then remove more backing, rather than trying to remove ALL of the backing at once and having a giant, fragile spiderweb of a quilt top that I'm trying to fuse things to?  

My friend's husband told her she should just throw this quilt away, but as a person who makes quilts myself, I just know how much it would mean to the quiltmaker to know that her granddaughter still loves and uses this quilt so many years later.  So I'm going to do my best to make it functional again (although I'll warn them that this quilt is best enjoyed indoors and out of direct sunlight from now on).

For the patches that need to be replaced, I wanted to find fabrics that would blend into the quilt top without standing out as obviously newer or different in style.  I found some things in my stash that were possibilities, but the colors were way too bright and saturated so I bleached them.  Very happy with the results!  Do you think I can sneak a leftover scrap of Disco Kitty fabric into this quilt?  I just don't want the new patches to draw too much attention to themselves.  The goal is that, when I'm done with this and give it back to my friend, it still looks like her grandmother's quilt to her.  Not sure if the kitties draw too much attention, but those Kaffe Fassett jelly roll strips on the left look fantastic after bleaching -- they will definitely blend in with the original fabric prints.  Too bad I didn't have larger pieces of those!

Bleached Fabrics, Possible Replacement Patches

My husband is annoyed with me for taking this on right now.  He doesn't think I can get Lars's graduation quilt done on time.  But I've started it, sort of!  Last night I cut out oversize templates (1/2" seam allowances on all of the triangles) for the paper pieced flying geese arcs and put each one into a labeled quart sized plastic baggie and matched it up with the appropriate fabric.  I've got a Sit and Sew this Saturday from 10 AM to 3 PM and my plan is to get as much of this quilt cut out as possible so I can start paper piecing those arcs by this weekend...  So the vintage quilt repair might have to hang out on the design wall for a bit until Lars's quilt is well underway.  It's just as well, because there's a lot about this that still needs to get worked out in my mind, like do I patch the giant holes in the quilt top before or after removing the base fabric and stabilizing the fabrics that I'll be stitching into with the new patch?

And so, I'm linking up with To Do on Tuesday at Stitch All the Things, and I'm setting a GOAL for this week: My goal is to get all of the triangles cut out for Lars's graduation quilt!  All of the pieces for all 48 blocks, all cut out and in the proper baggies so that I can work on paper piecing at Saturday's Sit and Sew!