chopkins: This Quilt

Remember this blog post back in December 2015? I wrote it as I contemplated repairing a very precious quilt. All that remained of the ancient english paper pieced (EPP) quilt (given to my daughter by her godmother) was a large ragged top, full of holes and with its tatters held together by rusty safety pins! The reds were particularly badly worn, in some places nothing left but a thin fringe of the original fabric, in all probability due to the type of dye used.

The task was pretty daunting. I needed to fill in the gaps, sew down the tatters, put in new batting, a new back, and quilt! I had a few ideas of my own too. But firstly I had to ensure that I did no further damage, the entire thing was so fragile, and large, that although all the work was going to be by hand I could not risk working on my knee.

I bought a king-sized, organic cotton sheet, washed (in non-bio detergent) and rinsed it several times to be sure there were no residual chemicals in it. I also bought several half metres of Liberty Tana Lawn in similar colours to the quilt pieces and treated them to the same laundering process

Next to lay out the quilt top over the sheet, the sitting room floor is the only space I have that is big enough, but even then it was pretty tricky trying to avoid standing on anything fragile (I must be a conservator's nightmare!!)

Once this was done I attached the assembled quilt to a home-made quilting frame (home-made by JTH). Most of the top is wound around the rollers running along the long sides, leaving a nice flat working space which can be rolled up and down as a section is completed. The assembled frame took up an entire bedroom (thank goodness our children have left home!)

I cut tiny pieces of (near enough) matching lawn and inserted them behind the holes then stitched them down with tiny stitches, through all layers.

In some places I could sew down the rips without patching from behind. The very edge of the quilt was in such a poor condition, with long rips and some rust marks that I reluctantly decided I needed to cut it off, making the quilt about 4 inches smaller all round.

I don't know a lot about the quilt, I can only trace its existence back 100 years to the 1920s with any certainty, but then the quilt gave up a secret. Some of the papers used in the original construction (EPP consists of wrapping small pieces of fabric around paper shapes) had been left behind. I carefully removed them with tweezers.

A mystery. I could see Latin, Greek, Phonetics as well as English - what had been used for the templates? A clever friend did some research and in all probability the papers are from an ancient thesaurus called the Gradus Ad Parnassum, a reference book that would have been part of many household's library (along with a bible, a dictionary and some medical hand book). It still does not give me a good reference date as the book was in publication from the 18th century for about 200 years, and maybe it would not have been cut up until it was no longer considered to be of any use. This brings me back to the 1920s

The initial repair work took over a year. Then it was back to the sitting room floor to lay out another sheet, sandwiching unbleached heirloom cotton quilt batting (from Lady Sew and Sew) between it and the repaired quilt top. Having decided that I would, as far as possible, hand stitch everything and use only natural materials I also decided I would finish the quilt with quite light stitching, using specialist quilting thread in a dark cream for the centre and dark red for the border.