Quilt repairs

Around 7 years ago when we first moved to this neighborhood, I did a little curbside pick-up. Someone had thrown out two really nice book cases. I thought they would be great for all our movies and the kids video games. Plus, I could use the second one for all my craft supply boxes. I had Hubby and his friend go down the road and bring them home in the truck. When they got them home, we found a quilt in the bottom cabinet. Since it looked like the family had moved out, we decided to just go ahead and keep the quilt. The rest of the cabinets were empty, so we thought they just didn't want it anymore. It looked like it had been well used over the years. My daughter (then 11) decided she wanted it. I washed it up and she has had it on her bed ever since.


It has seen better days I'm sure but our daughter still loves it. I spent the last year trying to convince her to let me make her a new one. She wanted nothing to do with a new quilt. She loves how light yet warm this quilt is. As you can see in the above photo, most of the top fabric has worn away. She won't wash it often since she is afraid it will fall completely apart.




I can't really tell if the top is machine pieced or hand stitched together. I do know that there are alot of little tiny hand quilting stitches all over it though. Someone put alot of work into this beautiful quilt and I wanted to save it for my daughter somehow. Then we came up with the idea of just adding a piece of fabric to it to cover the front part of the quilt.




I just took a full size flat sheet from Walmart and sewed it to the front of the quilt. I just wanted to do the whole pillowcase sew and flip thing but my daughter wanted the blue to still be on the front. So...I just pinned the sheet to the front, cut and hemmed where necessary to make it fit and sewed it on. Then I just added a couple rows of semi-straight stitching to hold them all together. She wanted it stipple all over in a crazy pattern, but this works out just fine too. I knew since the original quilt was a bit wonky and I wasn't getting the top sheet on perfectly, that stippling would cause too much trouble.

Of course I had to pin it out on the driveway because I don't have any floor space bigger than a baby quilt. As usual it was a windy day out too. Here I am wrangling the quilt, trying to get the sheet pinned all on a busy road. The city guys were out cutting the grass in the medians too. I felt like I was out on display lol. Too bad nobody stopped to help :) It was worth it though to see our daughter (now almost 18) smile when she had her "new" quilt for her bed, and I saved a piece of someone's hard work. The quilt had no label on it, so I don't know who made it or when. A good reminder to label all my quilts...