A New Counted Cross Stitch Design!

I spent yesterday afternoon working on Maxine's quilt. There isn't anything all that exciting about the process on that one at the moment. All I'm doing is cutting away the deteriorated patches and appliquéing new patches on in their place. I'm not even worried about replacing the stitches at the moment since I will be doing some insane embellishing on it.

So for today, I thought you would enjoy seeing one my newest counted cross stitch designs just released in the June 2007 issue of The Cross Stitcher magazine:



The Christmas Cat appears on page 40:



This design is based on a gorgeous kitty named, "Miss Lily" who belongs to Vicki, one of my fellow bloggers. Vicki's blog is Turkey Feathers and what a great blog it is! Do check it out if you have time.

Vicki had posted a photo of Miss Lily on her blog about a year ago and I absolutely fell in love with her. I emailed Vicki and asked for her permission to use Miss Lily as a model for a cross design. The Christmas Cat is that design!

I have an extra copy of this issue of The Cross Stitcher. If anyone wants it, I'll gladly send it out to the first person who emails me with a request for it.

Making It Up As I Go Along.....

Repairing this antique quilt isn't all that different from embellishing a new piece. Each repair requires a different approach.

I started yesterday by replacing these damaged fabrics on the corner:



Here's the "after" photo:



Ok, so my herringbone stitch is a bit smaller! Ya'll know that the herringbone is not one of my favorite stitches! At least I was able to match the color!

The next repair was a bit of a challenge:



I love this little boot but I needed to replace the background fabric. The boot was appliquéd onto the quilt so it was attached to the muslin foundation. I only had one choice here, cut into the foundation fabric. Because this quilt has a backing and I'm stitching through that, cutting into the foundation was not a big deal. I did find that this quilt has a middle layer of gray flannel!

Anyway, I cut the boot off, removed the rest of the damaged fabric and replaced it with a new piece. I then cut the excess fabric away from the boot, as close to the stitching as I could and then appliqued it back onto the new patch. Here's what it looks like now:



My next repair was to deal with this spiderweb:



I'm trying to keep as much of "Evelyn's" work here as possible. Several of the threads on the web were damaged but overall, it was in pretty good shape. Rather than re-stitch the entire web, I decided to simply couch all the threads to the quilt using one strand of sewing thread in a matching color.

Here's what it looks like now:



After that repair, I replaced the stitches on several seams.

So that's what I have to share with you today! A very interesting process isn't it? There's still a long way to go on my quilt but for today, I'll be putting it to the side and focusing on repairing Maxine's quilt which doesn't have nearly as much damage as mine.

Stash!

I didn't get in any stitching time yesterday. When my husband came home from work, he asked me if I would like to go see Johnny Depp in the new Pirates movie. No need to twist my arm there! I have a thing for Johnny Depp!

I had a lovely time but I must say, now that I've seen the 3rd one, the first is definitely my favorite. I don't want to spoil it for anyone so all I'll say is that I thought the ending was totally stupid. I'll leave it at that.

On to stitching, I received some wonderful stash yesterday! My mom, was at Hobby Lobby the other day and bought me some fabrics that she thought might work on my antique Crazy Quilt:



There are several areas on my quilt where the fabric is totally gone leaving me with nothing to clue me in on what was there. In those cases, I'll just have to pick something that I like and that works and use that. These should work nicely.

Several patches are a blue & cream silk stripe fabric and several others are a red & cream stripe silk. Those are in pretty bad shape so I'll be replacing them. You can see in the photo what I'll be using to replace them. I'll most likely "age" the blue stripe with some fabric dye. It's not an exact match, but it's close enough.

More stash arrived in the mail yesterday from Lynne. In the past, I've always felt a bit embarrassed when fellow stitcher's blogged about stash that I've sent to them so I've never really shared photos of gifts here on my blog that I've received. And there have been many wonderful gifts and I truly treasure them.

After thinking about it, I realized that it was my problem and I decided that anyone who takes the time to think of me and to send me gifts deserves a public "thank you" so from now on, I will make a point to share photos of the beautiful things that I receive.

This is what arrived from Lynne in yesterday's mail:



Aren't these beautiful?!!! Lovely fabrics, lace and a very beautiful & delicate dragonfly pin! Thank you so very much Lynne for your kind and very generous gift!

Today, I would like to work some more on my quilt and I really need to get going on Maxine's quilt. I have some ideas for that one that I think will combine what she wants me to do with it along with my need to at least keep it antique looking.

I plan to do a lot of appliqué on it. Lot's of velvet yo-yo's, velvet pansies, meandering vines with couched stems and I have this really cool idea for sunflowers! I want to head over to Cartwrights Sequins & Beads and order some sequins in vintage colors. Browns, golds, dark reds and such. The ones that have the pearly finish on them rather than the bright metallic colors. This should add the sparkle that Maxine asked me for without it being gaudy. Oh, it needs butterflies too!

More tomorrow.....

More Repair On My Quilt

I hope I'm not confusing anyone, working on 2 antique Crazy Quilts at the same time. From now on, I'll refer to these as either "My Quilt" or "Maxine's Quilt".

This one is my quilt:



Here you can see the damaged area that I worked on yesterday. I only replaced one fabric patch and then focused on replacing some of the damaged stitching in the area around it. In the case of this patch, I wasn't really sure what stitch was used directly on this patch. I think it was the Feather Stitch so that's what I did.

Here is a photo of the repaired area:



I do hope you all find this interesting and not boring. I plan to take a break from these projects here and there to do some of my insane, extremely embellished things. I'm not sure why I feel so compelled to repair this quilt. I'm assuming it's due to my appreciation of handmade things as well as my love of historical textiles. Because this is dated 1888, has the stitchers name on it as well as references to the location in which "I think" it was made, it called to me when I saw it at the flea market and it's almost as if I have to do this. It's kind of a strange feeling but there's something so wonderful about having the ability to save this quilt.

It's not my intention though, to replace every teeny tiny bit of damage. I want to keep the integrity and aged look of this quilt. I only want to replace what absolutely needs to be replaced to keep it from further deterioration.

I promised to share some historical facts with you in relationship to this quilt. My friends Susan and Bennie shared this information with me. The following is quote from Bennie's email to me:

"Seems like the souvenir ribbon was from the presidential campaign of Grover Cleveland & his running mate Allen Thurman. Actually, they lost the election that year, so maybe that makes your quilt more valuable? I'm not sure what the auxiliary stock exchange referred to - the stock market wasn't established until 1892. Maybe it was just a group of men who invested in stocks. I'm sure you are right that the quilt was made in NY - since Grover Cleveland was raised in upstate NY."

Very interesting, huh? Here's a photo of one of the 4 souvenir ribbons dated 1888:



Well, that's it for today. I want to work on this one some more later and I want to work on Maxine's quilt as well. I think you'll find that one very interesting as Maxine wants me to not only repair it, but further embellish it. And not in the traditional antique style but in my "insane Pam Kellogg" style. This will be a challenge as my heart & mind are resisting. Scott told me that I can't look at it as "defacing" it but instead, I have to look at it as "making it better". I already have a couple of cool ideas but first I have to replace the damaged fabrics.

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.