Tuesday, May 19, 2015

WIP Wednesday: Quilting an Antique

After over a week away on vacation and work I'm finally back at the sewing machine! I decided it's time to finish up this old quilt top I agreed to quilt up for a friend. I'm not sure if this is exactly old enough to be antique, but it is old.


Signature blocks made for the wedding of my friends' parents or grandparents... I can't remember which. I am going to have to get all the details so I can put it on the label. For some reason the top was never made in to a quilt and the family has been passing down the top ever since.


One reason the quilt was never finished may have been the poor construction. Talk about not lying flat! Oi vey.  The best thing to do would have been to tear the whole thing apart, square the blocks, and use new sashing. However, I wasn't quite up for that level of involvement and I didn't want to take that much away from the original quilt. If I tried to make some of these blocks square there wouldn't be much left of them! Instead I am just carefully pleating the winkles in the sashing wherever they appear and quilting them down.  It actually looks good, the busy plaid sashing helps to camouflage the pleats and I think after a gently wash/dry they will be hard to even find.


I love the old fashioned names! Whoever did the embroidery had gorgeous stitching. I am using a FMQ spiral to quilt the top pretty heavily in order to reinforce the old fabrics. It's a big quilt so this is going to take a while!

Linking to WIP Wednesday at Freshly Pieced.

3 comments:

  1. Wow that sounds like quite a task! It's fascinating that the top was passed down as it is, I guess if there aren't crafters in the family then what else would they do! Good luck with the quilting.

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  2. Love the signature blocks and all the different fabrics.

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  3. It's so nice to see an old top being finished. What a treasure for the family!

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