Repairing The Damage

I must say, this is certainly an interesting process! I sat on my sofa yesterday, staring at my antique crazy quilt, trying to muster up the courage to just throw myself into it and get it repaired. Eventually, that's exactly what I had to do.

I spoke with my mother yesterday and she reminded me that many of the old fabrics had acid in the dye. My original intention was to simply work over what is already there but due to my mom's reminder, I decided to remove the deteriorated fabrics and start from scratch. This also meant, in some cases, removing perfectly good stitching. Thank goodness for digi camera's! Thinking about it now, despite wanting to remove any chance of further damage, it's probably the easiest and most efficient way of doing this.

Here are the patches that I replaced yesterday:







And here it is again with my repairs:



Before I removed the damaged fabrics, I took some tracing paper, laid it over the quilt and traced the patch to be replaced. I then took a photo of it with my camera so I could replace the stitches.

Then, working with my embroidery scissors, a tweezer and a hatpin, I removed the stitches, cut away the bad fabric and pulled as much of the remainder of the fabric out of the seam as I could.

The next thing I did was to chose a new fabric. Remember, I'm looking to replace fabrics based on color rather than fabric type although when I can replace it with the same type I will. The black fabric that I removed was black taffeta. Now, I have taffeta in every color of the rainbow but for some unknown reason, I do not have black!

I then decided that I would use real black velvet but that didn't look right. It was too black. Thankfully, I keep several yards of black velveteen in my stash at all times. The velveteen has a slight gray reflection in the light so I went with that instead and it blends in nicely.

Ok, so basically what I'm doing is Needle-turn Appliqué. I cut out my template from the tracing paper pinned it to the new fabric, cut that out adding a 1/4 inch seam allowance, removed the pins, laid it on the quilt and hand appliquéd it in place, turning the seam allowance under with my needle and blind stitched it down.

Once I had it stitched down, I replaced the stitching with threads that match as closely as possible. I must tell you, I'm really bad with free-handing the double herringbone stitch! And there's a ton of it on this quilt! But, by the 3rd patch, I did get better at it.

Ok, so that's where I'm at on here so far. I promised you some history that my friends Susan and Bennie shared with me but I have to dash out the door at the moment to meet with Maxine, the owner of my commission CQ project. I should be able to share that with you tomorrow.