May to Kristine - Last quilt comment

 

This one is towards the end - when I was getting looser and I rather like it. I was tempted to fill the name in with the same pattern that is on the envelope - but did not have a good way to practice - and was running out of time - so this is the final.

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Additional thoughts - for the quilters - the rest of you should just get on with your day - and skip this part.

One last comment about the quilt project. We have two shops that sell quilting fabrics and I visited both with the quilts to look for replacement fabrics. There are some companies that sell reproductions of 1930s fabrics. The owners of those quilt shops were thrilled to see the quilts and they were in agreement with me that doing a repair that would make the quilts usable rather than doing a museum quality restoration that would make them only show pieces was perfectly acceptable. 

We also noted that the *art of quilting* has changed a lot. There are machines to cut the blocks or hexes and then there are machines that will do all the quilting. So the only *handwork* is stitching the blocks together - which is seldom done by hand. The quilts I repaired were pieced by hand. The binding around the edge, which required two steps had the first step done by machine and the second by hand. 

I suppose there are still a few people who quilt by hand. It's not like it's a lost art. Anyone can see *how* to do it. The question is how even can you make those tiny stitches. And then the ultimate question: how long does it take. It occurred to me that the readers who are quilters might be pondering - how much time did Jean put into this project. 

And there might be people with more ideas on how to source the perfect fabrics -- but I've already mentioned that my least favorite part of the project was looking for fabrics that would be good enough. *Perfect* fabric would have been cotton lawn - but I had no idea where to find that, much less find it the right colors and prints.

I have no idea how much time I spent on actual stitching. I got faster as I went along - but it was easily 50 hours and maybe closer to 100. I spent a significant amount of time futzing around considering options ....and then with the solid colors that I replaced... there was some washing and bleaching and distressing....aaakkkk...and I changed my mind on the border and ripped out the first repairs and redid them.....I'm happy and Caroline and Tracy are beside themselves...so....I can put this project in the category of: Yes, that is something that I have done and boy did I learn a lot. I'll probably do some more repair on these two - but, if anyone asks me to repair a quilt, I'll be able to decline without feeling guilty or selfish. I'm happy to have rescued the quilts and given them some more years.