My Other Passion.

 I love to rescue damaged vintage quilts or finish off other people's UFOs. Weird, I know! I love antique/vintage quilts but I don't buy them just to own and love them, although I sometimes do. My main passion is to rescue and repair/restore lovely old quilts to their former beauty. I love to add my own touches and feel connected to quilters who have gone before me.
    This first quilt is from the 1880s and is beautiful despite someone repairing the shattered fabrics in the 1940s by appliquéing fabric over the shredded pieces. As you can see she also had a very large stain of some sort. I have given her a good soak and she is drying now,prior to me taking off the 1940s fabric pieces and replacing them with vintage fabric from her era.
    The second top is from that era as well and had quite a large hole across 3 rows, as well as a mistake in the pattern, caused by the quilter mistakenly sewing the wrong end of the row to the top. I was going to leave it like that but it was an easy fix so while I took off one row to get fabric to make the repairs it didn't take much more work to fix the mistake. I plan to machine quilt the top soon and have another lovely antique quilt for display. The Clamshell quilt is hand quilted so replacing the shredded fabrics and filling in the areas without quilting will take a little longer but it is a labour of love.
I'll share a few more of my acquisitions soon.
Hugs, Jan Mac