Repair of a Grand­mother's Flower Garden Quilt

This is a 1930s Grandmother's Flower Garden Quilt.  This pattern was very popular in this era, and often made like this one, with a variety of pastel scrap fabrics on white.

What makes this one special is that it is owned by the woman who used it on her bed as a young girl.  At that time, her mother altered the shape of the quilt to fit on her bed.  Originally, it had two scalloped edges and two straight edges, bound in green.  The alteration took the scallops that used to be along the edge at the top of the photo, and attached it to the green-bound edge on the right.  The new top edge was turned and hemmed.

There was much wear on the quilt, and much patching needed.  The owner had started the work years ago, and sent the fabrics she had found, several of them vintage.  I added fabrics from my collection, both vintage and reproduction.

Here's one flower, showing 3 stages in the patching process.

Sometimes, the batting was missing, so I basted small bits of batting into the open spaces before patching.

Choosing a good fabric is always an audition process.  Sometimes what works best is using the reverse of a fabric to get the faded look.  I auditioned both sides of this red reproduction print, and decided pretty quickly that the right side was way too intense.

The reverse was almost too dark, but relative to the original red fabric on the far right of the photo, not too far off.  

Most of the wear was towards the center of the quilt.  I always imagine that's because the edges that hung down over the bed didn't suffer from being sat on.  In choosing fabrics, I used some that were more strongly colored than what was left of the original fabrics, after checking to see that they were not brighter than fabrics in better condition on the edges of the quilt.

Here are in-progress and after photos of the portion of the quilt that had the most wear.

Once these decisions are made, it's just a process of sewing one hexagon after another.  In the end, I patched 271 little hexagons.

Books on tape help a lot!  So does downloading interesting radio shows.  So do long phone conversations with friends.

Here's the completed quilt:

Then I added velcro to the long straight edge.  It is now going to hang in a hallway, both because of the long, thin shape, and because it will be more protected from light damage there.