I recently had the pleasure of helping restore a somewhat vintage Grandmother's Flower Garden quilt ... member's of Debbie's family have been working on this since the 1960's! And it turns out it's 100"x80" ... that is a whole lotta hexies!
Debbie brought this beauty to me and asked if I could make it whole. She had a list of names of women who had worked on this top over the years. And for as many hands that have touched this quilt top, it is in marvelous shape.
The top is completely hand-stitched and hand-quilted, so my job was not to quilt the top, but to bring it all together into a real quilt.
Evidently the plan had been to take a large sheet and cover it with the gorgeous flowers ... because upon examination I discovered that the flowers did cover the sheet but in some places actually over-ran the sheet. Hmmm ... I didn't want to take off those flowers that over-ran the sheet, so I found some muslin that matched the sheet. I sewed a strip of that to the backing and then layered in some thin batting to make it just like the rest of the top.
And then came the binding ... aaarrrggghhh ... talked with customer and explained that I just couldn't do each and every hexie with binding ... how long would that take and how much $$$ would you want to spend? So we decided to just trim down the hexies on the side ... we still got that zig-zag effect, not just with every single side hexie. I found a look-alike fabric for the binding and voila! We're in business.
Once the binding was done, I went around the edges and hand-quilted places next to the binding that hadn't been hand-quilted by the ladies through the years.
And shame on me for not taking pictures, but I made two pillow cases - each with one of the Flowers appliqued on the case. Pretty pretty pretty!
