Bringing a cherished quilt back to life - part 3

Now it was time to get serious and patch the worn areas of the front and use as many of Flora's blocks as possible. Each block was like this and had paper pattern pieces pinned to the corner. None of these blocks were square and several weren't flat so piecing anything was out of the question. Instead I pressed under a 1/4" (more or less) edge. No worrying about points or straight edges.

Most of the patterns were on brown paper bags but I did find a few amusing newspaper clippings.

I spread the quilt in the living/dining room floor. We actually refer to this as the sewing annex because we mostly use it for overflow of my sewing crap. We eat 1 or 2 meals a year in here. Anyway, we keep the furniture moved to the sides and I had just enough space to lay out this 70" x 80" quilt. Flora made several Trip Around the World quilts and apparently she was starting 2 more. She didn't strip piece these like we do. No. She worked it in rounds one square at a time. You can see one big white patch beside the center panel. That's where the $10,000 patch is located on the back and I covered it with a big chunk of batting.

Next I used the 16-patch blocks to connect things together. It was at this point that I decided that the entire quilt needed to be covered. I have a pretty good supply of feedsack fabrics and auditioned using only one print for all of the open spaces but it just didn't excite me. I needed to fully invest in scrappy.

Deep in my stash was a set of fat eighths of vintage fabrics. I'm pretty sure that these are real vintage but, if not, no matter. There's a ton of variety and the sizes are perfect.

I started at one end pinning the blocks in place and as I did I tucked in the fabric chunks. I did not worry about how one block overlapped another. You can see that this windmill block overlaps onto 2 16-patch blocks. I didn't even cut away extra bulk. I did have to go back and re-pin some of it because I remembered that I was going to load it on the longarm so I needed the pins to all be horizontal to the edge I would be loading on the machine.

​Next to figure out how to load and piece/quilt it.