What? Another Do Over?

Recently, a dear quilting friend,

thought of me when she was doing

some purging.

She brought me a very loved and worn

quilt top that she had collected

somewhere, sometime, in her quilting career.

She thought if anyone would like to do

something with this, maybe Kyle,

would like to be challenged.

Oh, boy.

The vintage basket quilt

is hand stitched with 48  nine inch basket blocks

using a muslin background and 30's fabrics.

Most of the blocks are very faded

with lots of repeats of the same fabric.

Many solid green and pink pieces.

I forgot to take a picture of the pieced border

that was on three sides, but you can get a little peek of it

in the above photo.

The blocks were probably pieced in love,

and the blocks, of course, varied in size.

Many of the blocks are not worth saving, so

I have chosen the best of them to work with.

At this point, I'm slowly unstitching,

repressing and resizing the individual pieces.

Here we go again.

As I have been taking this quilt top apart

I noticed these holes.

They were not in an organized pattern,

but I figured out the top had probably been tied.

Sure enough, I found a few places where the yarn

was still there.

This made me wonder about the original 

use of this quilt.  

Because there were many yarn ties still in tack, what 

were they originally tied to?

If the quilt top was removed from the backing, as in a summer 

quilt with no batting, why were there still yarn ties 

on the front?

I'm guessing, not all of the ties caught the backing fabric.

I also think that this probable summer quilt was washed many times.

Take a look at the seams.  

They're pretty messy, but not raveling which would

have definitely happened if the top was washed 

after it was taken apart.

That big blob is a piece of a yarn tie.

To see if I could rework these blocks,

I practiced with one block.

I didn't want to handpiece these, so I machine stitched

the block, but hand appliqued  the handles.

4.5" finished

This isn't going to be fast project, but

 might speed up once I get the 14/15 blocks apart.

It's a good outdoor project as it

creates lots of loose threads.

I even got a couple friends to help me

when we met at the park.

Until Next Time-

Kyle