Remedial Work on a Quilt

This is the first quilt I ever made . . . I think it was in 1996 and it was lovingly created for my son who used it from that day on, for many years.  I hadn't seen it for the past few years and discovered the reason recently . . . it had been chewed by their Leonberger when he was a puppy . . . lovingly chewed, I am sure.

When we visited the kids at Christmas this year I offered to do some repairs on this quilt and so I packed a little bag with scraps of similar fabric (I even had a few scraps of the very fabric I used originally) and a bit of quilt batting along with my needle and thread. Before going, I received this photo of one of chewed holes so I made a big log cabin block in case I wanted to use it as one of my reconstructive surgery.

I didn't intend to pull the quilt apart and re-make it . . .  I wanted to somehow honour the life that this quilt has lived for over fifteen years, including the chewed holes.  I first used some of my little scraps to create band-aids for the holes on the back of the quilt . . . some of them are shaped like leaves and others are more geometric in shape. I then moved to the front of the quilt (the most damaged) and trimmed away the rough edges before inserting a piece of quilt batting and then putting the pre-made quilt block on top of the damaged area.  I skewed the orientation of the block so that it is very obvious what I have done . . . and then I hand quilted it in place.

The repaired quilt has retained all the love of the original and the repairs will have their own history . . . "remember when Uli chewed this quilt and then Nana fixed it". The other chewed areas were repaired with strips of fabric that were quilted in place and a couple of leaf shapes now cover areas where the fabric was becoming very thin.

I think this quilt will be snuggled under while watching many more hockey games . . . and the repairs are functional ... with just a little nod to my passion for art quilting.