My Favorite Basket Quilt

I absolutely love this quilt!  If it had been in a shop rather than coming to me for repair, I might have just "had" to buy it. 

Part of why I love it is that green is my favorite color.  (To see another 1930s quilt with a green background, take a look at a Magic Vine quilt which I bought as a nearly completed top, which I finished and quilted.)  I also love the use of that dark green in (most of) the cornerstones and corners of the quilt.  They are a great example of how a bit of a contrasting accent can really perk up the design.  And I love the little red and white seersucker stripe that's in many of the blocks.  Such a tribute to summer!

 

The quilt was possibly made by the owner's great-grandmother.   Somewhere along the way, the quilt suffered some pretty severe damage around the midpoints of the two long edges, and a fair amount of worn fabric in the center of the quilt as well.   

I used several techniques for repair, depending on the damage.  I patched places where fabric and batting were totally missing or very damaged.  I applied netting to areas with lots of weakness and small tears but most of the fabric still present.  The photos below show before and after the repairs.

Before

After

Patched border and around handle, netting inside handle

Also noteworthy, the quilted handle echoing the appliqué.

  

In the block on the left, below, the quilter added a strip of fabric along one side.  What makes it really quirky is that she chose to use the high contrast dark green to correct whatever the mishap was.  

 

Patching the long stretches of damaged border was a major undertaking.  The inner edge of the yellow inner border was stitched on first.  Then new batting was basted in place, and the green border was appliquéd to the yellow border.   Lastly, I cut the scalloped outer edge as I sewed.  I appliquéd it inside the binding, keeping the original binding which was weak but mostly intact. 

 Here's an audition of four red prints to mend this basket.  Which one would you pick?

 

The quilt is backed with this sweet floral print.  The quilt bears a label for the  South Carolina Quilt History Project, one of the statewide quilt documentation studies that were held across the US during in the 1980s.  (Note: The publications that came out of these projects are a great resource for quilt/fabric history information.

I thoroughly enjoyed working on this one!  It's quite cheerful, and the fabric choices are fresh and fun.  And.....it's green!