Tying a Quilt

I had the opportunity to give the sewing ladies a little history lesson on quilting the other day. We were repairing an old quilt for one of our customers. I asked them to guess how old this quilt is. They guessed between 10-18 years. It's actually about 35 years old. They were amazed.

This quilt was originally tied in order to keep the top, batting, and back together. We untied it and replaced the batting as well as fixed a number of threadbare seams. The women had never seen a tied quilt before. We either do top-stitching with a sewing machine or machine quilting.

I also talked to them about how quilts were made from scraps of fabrics. People didn't just go out and buy yards and yards of cloth in order to cut it all up into a quilt.

We put a new binding on the quilt because the previous one had disintegrated. A lot of quilts can be preserved by simply putting a new binding on. I've started to do that with quilts around our house. We can get a lot more wear out of them in the years to come just by replacing the binding.

It was a privilege to work on this old quilt and to learn something about quilts of the past. It also feels really good to repair something instead of tossing it out.