Double Wedding Ring Times Two

A customer sent me two Double Wedding Ring quilts made by her grandmother.  She asked if I could take pieces off of the more “loved up” quilt (great words!) and use them to restore the less damaged one.  The quilts were both totally scrappy.  Some fabrics appeared in both quilts, but not all.  This is the first time I’ve had the opportunity to try that scenario! 

The owner told me:
My grandmother... used my mom's little dresses and probably her sisters' dresses also. My grandmother had 5 girls.

This project was all about saving the fabrics, so I wanted to make this work if at all possible.  I've always been reluctant to use fabrics from very worn quilts, because of their lack of sturdiness to withstand unsewing and resewing.  So I did a bit of experimenting before I confirmed with the owner that I could, indeed, find some strong enough pieces of the original fabrics.  Given that the loved up quilt was loved up, there were more than a few pieces that looked intact, but just shredded when I unstitched them.  I’d expected that might happen….and it did.  

The pieces on the less damaged quilt, especially the 4-patch intersection pieces and sometimes the ring pieces right next to the 4-patches, were usually a tad bigger than on the loved up one.  That made finding usable patching fabrics even trickier.  There were a couple of places where I put in three smaller pieces to fill the space of the two original ones.  

Here are some of the repaired places.

All in all, it was a successful and heartwarming conclusion to the saving of memories.  Here's the completed "keeper" quilt.

And here's the "donor" quilt.  You can see that this one is much paler.  This is due to being more faded and to having more shredded and missing fabrics, rather than a different set of fabrics.  You can also see ring segments that are now missing because of donating their fabrics.  (Sorry for the poor exposure.  It was a dark day, getting darker, and no nice photography days forecast for a week.  And I wanted to get the quilts in the mail back to their home....)