Repairs

The second quilt I ever made was for Nanu. I pulled together squares from various sources, including some boxer shorts and a dress of Anumasi’s. It was not the best-planned quilt though I did try to have some sort of theme (frogs, animals, foods, more frogs…) for each row of squares. It had not occurred to me to make it bed sized so instead, it was arranged to fit the backing, which was an end-of-bolt square-ish piece of fleece (that really didn’t match anything anyway, so I’m not sure what prompted that particular choice!).

This quilt went with Nanu to college, then came home for a while, then went off to grad school with her. I’m amazed that it lasted as long as it did before it needed a repair. Those boxer shorts had already lived a long and full life before they made it into the quilt, so it was not surprising that that particular square was the first to go.

After months of tripping over the quilt as it sat on my studio floor, I finally bit the bullet and got to work on it over the weekend. First things first, that square had to come out. I tried the seam ripper but it was easier to just grab the fabric and gently tug it out of the seams (carefully, of course!). Once it was out, I cut out a replacement square from… yet another pair of boxer shorts. These poor shorts were so old and ratty that, before she left, Nanu reluctantly gave them to me with the words, “use these up as a rag.” I couldn’t make myself use them up as a rag because these were her favourite pair, perfectly broken in and softened up. Plus, the fabric was still in good shape – it was only around the waistband that the fabric had given way – so I could definitely use a piece to repair the quilt!

I cut the square with 1/2” seam allowances which I folded and pressed before pinning in place, overlapping with the surrounding seam allowances and using the existing seams as a guide (another advantage to tugging out the old square rather than removing the stitches).

Hand stitched it into place and completely forgot to take a picture of it! The whole process took about an hour (mostly because my hand sewing is very slow).

Incidentally, this is my first attempt using Windows Live Writer. I can't say it was any more convenient than just writing it up in Blogger, especially since I had to format each picture as I added it which was a little tedious. Maybe there are some settings I can change somewhere? It did manage to get the colours and fonts right on its own...