Gloria

When I do a quilt restoration and I don't know who made the quilt, I make up a name for her. Like the Grey Lady quilt's maker: Gloria. No particular reason for the name, it just popped into my head.

Certain things give me hints about Gloria. She probably kept a scrap bag, and cut up old clothes and sheets and made them into other things (some of the gray came from a pair of men's trousers.) She had children or grandchildren -- or was a child -- during the forties (the juvenile prints date back that far.) She hated turning corners; her stitches are big and impatient in them. She had very basic sewing skills, but was savvy enough to use templates, because her rings are nearly perfect.

Gloria wanted this quilt to last. As I followed her stitches, requilting what had popped, I saw the care she took with her lines. She knew her cotton batting would migrate; she filled in the big sections with cross hatched stitches to keep it in place. She mirrored her patchwork when she could (putting the same colored patches on opposing sides of the rings.) The binding was simply the edge of the backing rolled over the raw edge of the batting and the top. Maybe she knew it would get the most stress, because she sewed it with her tightest, most compact stitches.

Her patchwork gave me a little tour of her time. Cowboys and Indians; a little boy's shirt. Rosebud prints from a baby's dress. Cartoon florals from a skirt that she or her daughter might have worn. Scraps of a striped flannel nightgown, patches of crimson with an enigmatic white design. All bright colors, fun prints.

The yellow patchwork I didn't like was printed with a big brown floral design, and was also something someone wore. I found intact garment seams that crossed the patches like small roads; a buttonhole sewn shut, the pucker of a dart pressed flat. A dress, or maybe a jumper. She must have loved it, because it was the fabric she used most for the patchwork. Or it was the most fabric she had.

I found a pattern of faint stretch marks and stitch interruptions that indicate Gloria may have used a lap hoop. Did she sit in a rocking chair or armchair while she worked on this? Was it after dinner, after the dishes were done, an hour of quiet sewing before bed? I do that almost every night. It's an oasis of calm in my otherwise hectic day. Was it the same for her? Did the hanging folds of the quilt keep her legs warm on a cold night, or did she roll and clip them?

Grey Lady would take two weeks and more than twenty-five hours to repair. As each day passed, I became more engrossed in it. I didn't see the yellow anymore, or maybe I got used to it. I hate making my own binding (sheer laziness) but I shopped in three fabric stores before I found the right fabric for Gloria's quilt. I was anxious about what to do with it. Even with my repair work, it would never be a display beauty, but damn if I was going to sell it to someone who would cut it up to make angels and teddy bears. I couldn't do that to Gloria.

QIP

The quilt in progress is a restoration job, which we've named Grey Lady Down:



Like so many of my repair jobs, this is a double wedding ring quilt. Circa 1950, with a colored background. Double wedding ring quilts are almost always multi-color patchwork against white backgrounds; to find a color background is rare. Of these, pastel blue, green, yellow and pink are the most common backgrounds. I've personally never seen one with a gray background before this one; not even in quilt history books.

Grey Lady Down came to me as a real mess. Three fist-sized holes through the quilt, patchwork shredded and/or hanging loose, amateur repair work, quilting stitched popped all over the piece. And the smell. Someone shoved this in a garage or an airless attic, where it soaked up that always-delightful Eau de Neglect.

The first step was to get rid of the stink, so I carefully hand washed the piece and let it soak in a little Woolite and vinegar. Vinegar, btw, will neutralize the worst smells you can imagine. I dried it on a line out of direct sunlight and then spread it out on the porch table to assess the work.

Lots of restitching and repatching to do. Some of the flimsier blue calico patches had disintegrated. I'd need to replace four large sections of background to repair holes where the fabric, batting and foundation had been torn out. Whoever tried to repair the quilt whip-stitched long sections of raw ends together with red and yellow sewing thread, and as a result they were fraying all to hell. The binding, also rotted and torn, had to be completely replaced.

Even with the repairs, Grey Lady Down would never be a museum piece. The original maker had used two different gray fabrics for her background pieces, and they had faded differently. The stitching was primitive; 4 to 5 spi (stitched per inch) in some places, 2 to 3 spi in others. Her uneven stitching was too long on the bottom and too shallow on the top -- the main reason her quilting had popped all over the piece; inadequate anchoring -- and was erratic.

Then there were her color choices. I am not a fan of yellow, and this quilt was covered with yellow patchwork (still intact). She used the yellow around all her ring intersections, too. The color was blinding and completely inappropriate for a gray background. I think she was trying to liven it up, but ugh. And there was too much yellow in the quilt for me to replace it all. Out of respect for the maker, I like to leave as much original work intact as I can.

If I fixed it, she'd have to be a keeper.

On the plus side, the quilt was marvelously soft. The backing; a solid light gray cotton, had weathered the neglect and aged wonderfully. There is a feel to old quilts that you can't duplicate with today's fabrics. I felt a certain reluctant admiration for the maker, too. Here was a woman who had few quilting skills and yet took on hand-piecing and quilting an advanced pattern. She was such a renegade she used a mourning color for the background and then threw sunshine yellow all over it. That and someone who had even less skills than the maker had tried to repair it.

Rare color aside, this quilt had meant something to at least two women. That was what really made it worth saving. So up she went on the repair rack, and I got to work.

Beginning

There's no other way to put it: I am a quilt junkie. New quilts, old quits, hidden quilts, wall quilts, objects made of quilts -- I see them, I turn into a pile of Jell-O.

My obsession with quilts started with a double wedding ring quilt, made by my great-grandmother, which I slept under for most of my childhood. The quilt had a pastel blue background and patchwork rings, the latter probably made from scraps of g-grandma's dressmaking. In her day, nearly every woman made her own clothes.

I could sit and stare at the patches on that old quilt for hours, wondering where they'd come from and why she chose those colors. Looking back with the knowledge I have now, I know it wasn't a particularly well-made quilt, and the sewing and quilting strayed more to the primitive side, but I loved it, and kid love is blind.

After I grew up and left home, I asked my mother to send me that old quilt. That was when she informed me that it had grown so ragged over the years that she had thrown it away. I've lost lovers who didn't cause me as much anguish as knowing the quilt of my childhood was gone forever.

That was when I decided to become a quiltmaker, and remake the quilt of my childhood.