Repairing A Quilt!

Last Friday night we went to some dear friends house to visit. and I came out with a couple of baby quilts to finish for them.  

Sue asked me if I could repair these quilts for her.  So now, I'm doing my best to get these quilts back to there nice looking self's.  The first quilt I am working on is belonged to my youngest son best Friend (Tyler) who is Brazil doing Missionary work. 

The quilt you can tell was well love and used by a little boy, due to the worn edges and holes in the quilt. The quilt was patched several times.  The fabric has become very thin also.  I told Sue that the quilt would have to be trimmed down, she didn't mind. 
The first thing, I did was to remove all the binding,  my goal was reuse the binding.  The removing of the binding took ruffly 3 1/2 hours, do to all the stitches in the binding.  After the binding was removed I then ironed them out and they were ready to go.   there were in good shape.

After that, I then started to remove all the yarn ties that were all over the quilt.  Then I need to take all the stitches that were holding the front and back of the quilt together out.  There were a lot of zig-zag stitches that were holding it together.  Since I knew I had to trim all the edges down, I cut the stitches out with scissors all the way around, so all I had to do then is to remove all the basting stitches that were hidden. 

Once that was done I was able to gently remove the the quilt top. Underneath was a old piece of batting that was very worn and need to be replaced. After discarding of the batting, I was able to see the backing which was in great shape, the only holes were where the quilt was tied which were very small.  The back was a old sheet I think, which worked great for tying quilts. 

First off was to repair the quilt top best I could.  I laid the quilt top out and then cut away the major holes and worn areas around the edges.  The major hole was  5 1/2" in height so I knew one edge would be the biggest area to cut off.  After all the trimming, there were still a few holes and worn spots.  So I then, repaired them with using a zig-zag stitch to bring the seam together, then I followed that with some fray check to hold the raw edges together.  I also put some zig-zag stitches around the patches to reinforce them.  The top looked much better and was ready for reassembly.

I laid the backing down and found a piece of batting that would work on top of the backing and then to quilt top into a quilt sandwich.  And with a curved needle and some heavy duty DMC Floss that matched the quilt.  I tied the quilt back together.  I have almost tied, so this weekend I need to pick up more to finish it.

Since I was almost done with the tying, I decide to go ahead and sew the sandwich together around the edge, to prepare for the binding.  So, all I have to do now is put on the binding back on and it is finished. In the next day or so!  Then I can get the other quilt repaired.

I hope both Sue and Tyler will enjoy for more years to come with these repairs.

Love, Inspire, Create,

Tina