Vintage Hexie Quilt Repair

In what will surely come as a surprise to anyone reading this blog, I will be posting things this month other than Really Random Thursday posts!

Several months ago, a friend approached me about working on a quilt that had been made by her grandmother. It was a hexie quilt, hand pieced in the shape of diamonds, probably out of feedsack fabric. It was really beautiful. Someone had added borders on both long sides, but in the process of adding them had stretched the sides so that it rippled. She asked if I would take a look at it and see if it could be repaired and completed.

I thought, "Sure, how hard could this be??" Just remove the borders, get a backing and hand it over to Darby, who does all my longarm quilting.

So I removed the borders, and then realized that a lot of the stitching of the hexies along the sides needed to be repaired. And the top needed pressing. That wasn't too bad. I got a cute daisy print from Joann Fabrics for the backing, and handed it off to Darby.

Then came the most time-consuming part, which I had not anticipated--the trimming. When I receive quilts back from Darby, they are always always nice and straight, with 90 degree corners. So that was not the problem. It's that it was not straight to begin with, due, I think, to the hand-pieced nature of an English paper pieced quilt top. I finally chose a line through the center and measured out to each side and started trimming. The half-hexies along the edges are not all equal, but I don't think anyone will really notice.

I was able to use the removed border fabric for the binding.

It's a beautiful quilt and was certainly worthy of being completed to pass on to future generations.