The Dog Ate My Handwork

A few posts ago, I mentioned that I had gotten one of my quilts back for a repair job.

I made this quilt for my son Dave when he was a senior in high school.  He graduated in 1999.

This quilt has survived in relatively good shape, considering that it went to university with him and lived in a frat house for awhile!  Not to mention surviving a fire in their apartment building the first year that he and Emily were married in 2006.

It most recently has been on the bed in their guest room, and my grand-dog Roo kind of claimed it for his daily naps.  And when Roo naps, he likes to fluff his bedding until it's Just Right.

Result:  a nice hole all the way through the quilt.  Through many seams of patchwork.

 The first thing I did was add some batting inside the torn area.  (Perhaps the old batting was too delicious not to chew? ) To do that, I had to take out quite a bit of the quilting.  Here is the back with the new batting worked in.

                                        


Then I "sutured" the backing and front edges together to have somewhat of a base to build my repairs on.

         

A quick search through my blue fabric stash turned up a piece of the backing fabric!  Hooray for saving everything and being a hoarder.  Sometimes it pays off!  I made a patch big enough to cover the jagged tear in the back, turned the edges under a quarter inch, and appliquéd it on.  I am very glad for the busy print on the backing fabric.  It hides a lot of sins!

Okay, the hole in the backing is repaired and there is new batting under there.

Now for the front of the quilt.  I decided to make some new patchwork squares big enough to cover the tear.  My scrap basket came in handy.  I made one new half-square triangle block, and one big quarter-square triangle block.  I ironed the edges under a quarter inch.

I sewed the new half-square block on first.  It is the pink flower/blue batik in the lower left corner.  

Once that one was in place, I sewed on the larger square.  It is the one with the polka dots, pink and lavender flowers, and blue fabrics.

Wouldn't you know it, while I was doing these repairs, I kept finding "popped seams," that had torn out because the edge of the patchwork had frayed.  

These would have benefitted from new patches appliquéd over them as well.  Instead, they got sutured to hold them together.

The final step was to do a little more machine quilting over the repaired area, which was bulging out rather noticeably.  It was hard to stuff this big quilt under my sewing machine, so I just ran the machine around to make some stitches to hold things together.
   

All done!

Now my darling grand dog Roo better behave himself!

Who, me?