A once lovely 73×73” Butterfly quilt, well used, well laundered and most likely well loved, this quilt needs help. The fabrics are worn and torn over much of the quilt top and the batting…oh my goodness!

And the batting in the sashing strips has migrated to form hard lumps. The picture below shows a lump that is at least a half inch thick. The butterfly blocks are heavily hand quilted and most if not all the batting stayed in place. Sadly the sashing strips have only 2 straight lines of quilting and time and use has caused many of these straight stitching lines to pop (break).

Rather than have a quilt with hard large lumps I decided to experiment and remove the sashing batting. “Oh sure” I thought, this will be fast and easy…well…I was wrong. ☹️ I ended up needing to slice open the long side of the sashing, removing the remaining quilting stitches and pulling out the lumpy white cotton batting.

This process reiterated to me my thankfulness for modern day batting. This quilter used what she had, making the best of the materials available to her. Quilters of today: count your blessings!

I cut 40 rectangles of Hobbs white 80/20, positioned them in the quilt sashings and zig-zag stitched the openings closed.

Well…I should have done more. What I didn’t expect to happen is that as I worked through the repairs on all 40 sashings, the new batting rectangles shifted inside the quilt. I did not secure them properly and had to cut openings once again and by using long tweezers, reposition the rectangles.

Here’s where I forgot to take pictures. Using various vintage white or very light ivory eyelet trims, I edged each of the sashing strips. Besides liking the look of eyelet, this also brought down the heavy look of the solid pink fabric. Imagine the pic below does not have green vines. 🤪

Let me jump to a Butterfly needing a fabric fix. Here are before and after pics of a “repair” that did not involve replacing the fabric. I stitched a small zig-zag stitch at the outer edge of the missing fabric.

I might have mentioned at the top of the blog that my intentions when rescuing or saving any vintage quilt are never to completely restore the piece but rather, I try and let the quilt retain its well loved appearance and at the same time add just enough to give it new life. Every one of my rescue quilts, when I am finished, take a trip through my front load washing machine and dryer and are ready to be used.

The three pictures below show: 1. The damaged Butterfly fabric, 2. A closeup of the machine zig-zag stitch around the damage and 3. The Butterfly after stitching and the trip through the laundry.

Several of the Butterflies were so badly damaged that they needed to be replaced. Keeping it in one piece I carefully removed one badly damaged Butterfly, I placed it on a piece of flexible plastic, drew around it with a sharpie and cut it out with my utility scissors.

About the purple plastic: the Dollar Store to the rescue. Any one of these types of stores sell three ring binders with flexible plastic covers. They are perfect covers for making templates. Using a box cutter I cut off the front and back. I’ve used these plastic sheets for years, they come in so handy for template making.

This is a new fabric Butterfly. This is also the “wrong” side of the yellow print fabric. The motifs were perfect but the “right” side of the fabric was not. Would you have known if I hadn’t said…probably not.

There’s so much more to tell you about in this picture above. After pinning the motif in place I raw edge machine applique stitched around the outer edge.

I then decided to add a machine decorative stitch around the outside of the butterfly. I felt it gave the butterfly an almost lacy edge look.

Next, using a 12 weight black thread from Aurifil and the Triple Stitch on my machine I stitched the black lines. Below you’ll find what the stitches look like on my sewing machine screen:

There’s a lot going on in the above pic, I’m using my Sue Pellon ruler to draw (with a black Pilot Frixion pen) the undulating lines for the green vine to follow. I wanted some consistency so I red tape marked where the ruler should be placed on the sashing strips.

The green vines, cut on bias, are held in place with Elmer’s Washable School Glue and you may notice the glue bottle has a blue tip? it’s the end of a mechanical pencil and produces such a nice narrow line of glue!

The cornerstones in the quilt sashings need flowers! I’m using my Accuquilt Cutter and Die to cut flower shapes from old very worn and torn quilt pieces.

Each of the yellow old quilt flowers gets a vintage yo-yo machine stitched to the center.

Once the yo-yo’s are secured, the unit is machine appliqued to the quilt.

And the green leaves…all 160 of them…glued, pressed to dry and machine applique stitched. (And yes, I did fix the bad stitching on the vine)

Remember the original quilt and the orange Butterfly? It got a lovely make-over by laying a small light ivory eyelet doily on top. I ran a very thin bead of glue around the outer edge of the orange Butterfly, carefully placed the doily atop, iron pressed to dry the glue and then carefully trimmed away the excess doily.

The deep red Butterfly got basically the same treatment as the orange but this time I used white lace.

This method of “no-pin” fold over binding was an experiment for me. I used the regular method of pinning the binding to the front side of the quilt and stitching. I then opened up the seam and steam pressed. My next step was to flip the quilt over to the back side, run a thin bead of glue at the edge of the quilt seam, fold the binding to the back covering the stitch line and iron press dry.

Success! I was “pin free” as I hand stitched the binding down. Note: if trying this, do not!!!…do not glue close to or on the machine stitch line. It is very difficult to hand stitch your binding closed thru dried glue!

The vines needed flowers! I found these new daisy flowers in my stash, I think they are perfect for the sashings.

I just love this quilt rescue, I hope you do too! Blessings and Happy Quilting! Rhonda

When friends get together, all sorts of crazy things can happen! Last July while retreating at the Boehm House in Moulton, TX, Robyn says something like: how about we cut this quilt in half, you do your thing on your part and I’ll do the same and when we meet again next summer we can compare our finished pieces! I jumped at the chance to work with half a quilt!

https://1914boehmhouse.com/

I’m going to overload you with pictures that will hopefully give you some ideas about transforming a vintage quilt should you ever get the urge. Grab a coffee and let’s go!

First let’s start with a picture of the finished challenge quilt above. The next picture shows you what I started with. The quilt is in relatively good condition, just showing signs of a bit of wear. Quite cuddly some might say.

In this project my goal was two fold: to give the pinwheel quilt pops of color and interest and to do most if not all the work by machine.

Using an Accuquilt Cutter and a flower die, I cut using a tattered Double Wedding Ring as well as a yellow/white Drunkards Path.

Each of the die cut flowers has a vintage yo-yo in the center. To make the process a bit easier I machine stitched the yo-yo to the flower before machine appliqué stitching the flower to the quilt. Let me explain a bit. If I had machine stitched the flower to the quilt first, each flower requires stitching/turning the quilt 360 degrees. Adding the yo-yo would require a repeat of the process. By first sewing the yo-yo to the flower, I saved time and frustration under the needle. My mantra: don’t make things harder than they need to be.

Every other open white space gets a flower/yo-yo decoration.

I sew on a Bernina 550 and used the applique stitch #1329. The default setting is perfect. I am using yellow Superior Threads, the Omni line, color 3050.

https://www.superiorthreads.com

I love that by using a tattered Double Wedding Ring quilt from which to cut the flowers, it features so many pieces of the vintage feed sack fabrics.

Remember how the project started? A quilt cut in half. That means I have a piece with only 3 borders. Hmmm… I cut away these borders because I can use these pieces to make smaller motifs.

Again, Accuquilt Cutter to the rescue. By strategically placing the Die I can cut lots of hearts from the cut away 3 borders. This heart Die is from Crafter’s Edge, an adapter is all I needed to use it with the Accuquilt.

https://www.accuquilt.com/

https://craftersedge.com/

But…when I cut away the 3 borders I had a bit of a boring looking quilt. I dug into my stash of quilt parts and found several rows of a vintage yellow Drunkard’s Path quilt. These rows made perfect “new” borders for my pinwheel quilt.

The borders were machine stitched to the pinwheel piece. This means I was stitching through 6 layers, 3 of the pinwheel and 3 of the Drunkards Path. Yes it created a bulky seam but I pressed the finished seam open and from the front side of the quilt I zig-zag stitched, straddling the original seam. The zig-zag stitch nicely flattened the bulk but I now needed to address the raw edges on the back of the quilt.

One of the last things I did before binding was to hand stitch bias binding over the raw edges.

At this point I was moving fast and must have forgotten to take pictures so the next pic shows the quilt on my design wall. I’ve machine appliqued flowers and hearts and yo-yo’s all across the quilt. I’ve also sewn on the binding but in the next picture you’ll see that I added lace at the binding edge on the front of the quilt.

After turning and hand stitching to the quilt back I decided to give the binding a bit of interest and again using the applique stitch and matching thread, I stitched directly over the inner binding edge.

I can honesty say I was not overly thrilled with the pink and white Pinwheel quilt when I began this transformation. With the additions complete I love this finished piece!

With the plan to do most all stitching by machine, you can see the border hearts are applique using pink thread, again, Omni by Superior Threads, color #3131. I sewed the buttons on with the machine using the #18 foot, added lots of ribbons, all stitched in place with a very narrow zig-zag.

Where the tattered DWR cut heart shape showed really bad damage I placed laces and/or trims over the holes and machine stitched in place. This is also a good picture below to show you that the zig-zag stitch straddling the quilt and the added border pieces of almost un-noticeable. There’s so much going on with this quilt that I’d be surprised if someone notices without me pointing it out.

A close-up showing the hem stitching used to attach the yo-yo’s to the die cut flower. The white beads were sewn down by hand.

If you look closely, the picture above shows how I used a tiny machine zig-zag to stitch the ribbon bow in place.

The border cut small heart have an added vintage button to each of their centers. The remaining picture show more close-ups of the add-ons and finally the finished project.

Thank you Robyn for suggesting this challenge, it was a joy!

Did I have in mind what my finished project would look like before I began? A resounding “NO!” Each step was an experiment. How did I know when I was finished? It was when I realized I was out of ideas for anything additional.

Blessings and Happy Quilting, Rhonda