My Trip Around the World

Last week when I was in an antique store picking up a few chachkas for the pharmacy, I ran across an orphan quilt top wishing to be adopted. Now ordinarily I don't buy quilts.  It would be akin to an artist buying a masterpiece versus an artist painting a masterpiece, and in this case I felt the quilt was very far from a masterpiece, so I bid the orphan good-bye and went home.


Several days later I had a change of heart and made a trip back to the antique store to look at the quilt again.  Unfortunately, the piece looked to have been machine washed, evident by the bleeding of the purple fabric onto the white fabric and by the fraying of all then material when viewed from the backside. The pattern was set 'on square' rather than 'on point' and the design seems to stops rather abruptly on the outside edge.

However, on the plus side; the pattern used for this quilt is a very difficult design called Trip Around the World. The seamstress who made this quilt cut 1600 pieces of fabric into 1 inch squares and HAND SEWED them together, producing one large 48 inch square! And when I considered in awe an undertaking of this magnitude, I knew that this orphan needed a home. So, here is my plan for this quilt:


-Finish the quilt by adding a six inch boarder (hand sewn of course)
-Remove all fraying on the backside and iron using a good quality quilters starch
-Assemble quilt top, batting, and backing and figure out a way to put it on the new Gracie quilt frame I received for Christmas (see December 30th post)
-If I live long enough to finish the hand quilting, I will add a binding and tea-dye the entire project to even out the bleeding of the purple fabrics


I will blog my progress as I work through this project so look for new posts and photos as time goes by and wish me luck.