A Joyful Dresden Plate

 

I love this quilt!  This is especially notable because the era and colors are not among my favorites.  What pleases me so much is the full-out exuberance of the fabric choices.  The wild (for a background) print makes the whole design dance.  This quilt makes me smile!

At some point in its history this Dresden Plate quilt was probably thrown in the washing machine. The wool batting (which may have come from the family's sheep) ended up with lumpy and uneven shrinking.  Also, that wild background fabric is unsuitable for the washing because it was very, very lightweight, almost as light as a voile.  Apparently, two borders had already been cut back.  The remaining two borders were very badly torn, as were 3 large areas in the body of the quilt.  

 

 

There were also smaller rips in the background and damage to some of the blocks, minor damage compared to the huge tears in the background fabric.  The quilt clearly was not usable and it would be dangerous to ever wash it again.  So the goal was to get it to a point that it looked OK and that is safer to handle without further damage.  The quilt owner agreed to having the two remaining borders cut off, since there was very little, if any, strong fabric left.  My former student, Pam, was working on the quilt.  After cutting off the damaged borders, she put on a new binding all around before going further.

It was going to be difficult to find a print for the patches that would blend well with the original fabric.  Pam wrote this about her journey with that fabric: 

I saw this as an opportunity to experiment with inkjet printing some patching fabric. The print had a small repeat and only 3 colors. So, I teamed up with my son (the Photoshop guru) and used the Color Map available from Spoonflower (link below). The Color Map provides the computer codes (called HexCodes) which tell the computer what to print.  The red in particular varied across the quilt, and I picked an average shade.  My son then took a 3-4” wide scrap from the torn borders and created a 8.5x11 page of the print.  I printed 2 pages and patched the worst areas. To take this concept a step further, to patch larger areas, would be to send the file to Spoonflower and buy yardage. They have expanded their fabrics and include a couple lighter weight cotton fabrics.   

 Links for supplies used - We have no affiliation with either of these: 
- Spoonflower 
Color Map fabric 
- Electric Quilt
fabric: Printables Inkjet Fabric Sheets - color: Cotton Basic Warm-White  
(A warmer white is a good choice for matching old fabrics.  They usually were not as white-white as our fabrics are now, and tend to have browned or yellowed with age.)
- Also - Pam's website 

The first photo below shows a damaged edge and below it the new fabric that Pam printed.  The second photo shows the completed repair.  

And here is the completed quilt!  It looks fantastic!

 

We all learned a lot with this project, as I have not attempted reproducing prints this way before.  It worked so well!  I am now imagining that I will try it one day when needed.  

Thanks to Pam for the work she did, and for her photos.

I really do enjoy the full-out joy in this quilt, which is now even happier without all the tatters.