Dog Meets Quilt. Visible Mending to the Rescue!

I highlighted my first foray into the fun of visible mending just a few months ago.

Visible mending is all the rage these days in the reduce, reuse, and recycle community.  It's a way to mend clothes by adding stitching that adds to the fun of wearing them while keeping them out of the landfill for as long as possible.  It also helps the clothing tell the story of its long life and expresses the appreciation of the person or people who have worn it.

Here's visible mending of a quilt.  A repair student of mine had her dog chew a hole in her own bed quilt while I was guiding her through repairing and re-backing a Victorian crazy quilt for a friend.  She sent the story and step-by-step photos so I could see, and agreed to let me share them with you here.  Thanks, Pam!

(Pam has written a book on mapping old cemeteries, so she and I overlap on liking history  and having books on relatively obscure topics.)

Now, here's Pam to tell her story:

I took my new status as a quilt repair person to heart and came up with a solution.  After washing it to remove the slobber (no basting or anything) I traced the hole.

 

It reminded me of a paw and I drew a paw shape around the hole shape.

 

This quilt is reversible - same color both sides - so I had to duplicate the patch on both sides. 
Cut two patches.
Filled in the hole with batting.

 

Here pinned to reverse patch.

 

Hand stitched the patch in place.  Stuck in marker pins to line up the reverse patch and stitched one in place.

 

Made a stencil from the pattern to chalk in the embroidery lines.
Did a running stitch through both patches.  Actually tricky because I discovered stitching a line on the top doesn't always make a line on the reverse if the needle isn't perfectly perpendicular.  Then did a whip through the running stitch to make it continuous.

      

Finally, there is Jia sitting by the patch, which surprised me by being nicely placed in the middle of the spread.

 

Kudos, Pam!

Aside from the fact that the quilt got damaged in the first place, the mend is quite sweet, don't you think?  That's the visible mending concept, to celebrate the item and its story, keep it functional and loved.