Antique Quilt Repair

I started the repair work on both antique crazy quilts yesterday. The first thing I wanted to do with my commission piece was to repair the beaded area and to re-anchor the beads:



This one patch took me 5 hours to repair. The beading was worked on a net lace and then attached to the quilt. The edge of the lace had deteriorated along the seam so the first thing I did was to sew the lace onto the quilt along that edge. The edge was quite shredded so once I had it secure on the quilt, I went back over the thin area with long straight stitches (black sewing thread) and then I couched those down.

My next task was to re-anchor all the beads. Oooh, that was tedious! I used the tiniest, thinnest beading needle that DMC makes and for many of the beads, I couldn't get the needle to go through. When that was the case, I took a tiny stitch over the thread that ran through the bead. One stitch on each side.

The beads were originally sewn on with the finest silk thread I've ever seen! It's no wonder so many of the beads were loose!

So now I'm ready to replace the deteriorated patches of fabric. I will be starting on that over the weekend.

Once I had the beaded area repaired on that quilt, I moved on to my quilt. I decided to start with this beautiful little velvet star:



The poor little thing was hanging on only by the orange threads in the middle. I appliquéd this piece back onto the quilt and then reinforced the seams of the star onto the quilt. I then removed the orange perle cotton in the middle and replaced those stitches with new perle cotton.

So those are my accompliments for yesterday. After a few chores that I still have to do for today, I will be pulling out my boxes of fancy fabrics and the new things that my mom picked up for me and I will start the process of replacing the damaged fabrics on my quilt. I will take before and after photos for you.

My plan is to try to replace pieces with a similar color and not necessarily the same type of fabric. It's the color that I want to try to keep and that all depends on what I have on hand here to work with.

Stay tuned. This should be interesting! I'll have that history info on my quilt for you tomorrow.