Halfway!

I've got DD#3's wedding quilt top to the halfway point! Well, it's really one row more than halfway, because there are an odd number of rows. I think this one will be stunning when finished, and photos just don't do the colors justice. It's so much prettier in person.

I've laid out the last two quarters of this quilt, each row pinned. I had to take a little break from working on this, because I had no quilt on the guest bed, and I'll have two different sets of people sleeping in that bed within the next week. One set arrives the day the other set leaves.

I have a quilt top I want on the guest bed, but no time to baste, quilt and bind it. I have another quilt pinbasted that would fit the guest bed, but again, no time to quilt and bind it. I have very few quilts in the house, since I give almost all of them away. I have no queen sized quilts in the house...except...I do have a quilt we were given as a wedding gift. The pieces to this quilt were cut out by DH's great-grandmother, but she passed away before she could finish the quilt. A friend of the family finished the quilt, and it was given to us when we got married. The top is all double knit polyester, the backing cotton.

This quilt has been used hard through the years. It was on our bed for many years, my kids made lots of blanket forts with it, there were a few times we all squished under it to watch a movie when the kids were young and we lived in Missouri. This quilt has been well-loved, and when I started to think about it, I realized if my kids were ever to fight over a quilt after I die, it wouldn't be one I made, but likely be this one, because it is jam packed with memories. I didn't start quilting until my kids were all teenagers or older. I was too busy homeschooling and making their clothes when they were younger.

This block was in the worst shape. and I knew I needed to do something about it. I had no double knit in my stash, but last time I went to see my parents, my mom gave me an old pair of white double knit pants that had belonged to one of my aunts. The "binding" was just the backing folded over the front, and it was completely threadbare. The entire backing could use replacing, but, the quilt was hand quilted and I kind of hate to replace the backing because of that. Someday, I may lay another layer of backing over it, and machine quilt it enough to stay in place, but I'd rather not. Deciding how to repair an old quilt is really a matter of preference, when it's not restoring a valuable quilt. So how did I tackle the repair?

I appliqued the "new" white double knit over the shredded pieces, adding in batting where there was none. I also added a wide binding directly over the old one. It's not perfect by a long shot, but this repair likely gave this old quilt a few more years. For now, this quilt is on the guest bed, but once I get the quilt I'm making for the guest bed finished, this one will reside on a quilt rack in the guest room. It can be an extra blanket instead of one used regularly, and hopefully the light use will extend it's life considerably. 

I hadn't handled this quilt in a while, and I had forgotten some of it's charm.

Both the top and bottom rows only have 3/4 stars. I've seen lots of half blocks on edges, but 3/4 blocks struck me as funny. There are several areas of "poverty piecing". Can you see the seam in the bottom right hand corner of the pink star? There are multiple places in the quilt where the squares were pieced. I've done that myself a few times, when I've run out of fabric.

I'm still hoping to get those two quilt tops finished before January 1st, but a lot is going on in the next week, so we'll see!