A Spoooooooky Quilt: Make Something Old New Again

Why is it spoooooooky? Because it's Halloween.

Moving on.

My friend, also named Amy, had an old family quilt with major deterioration through the center. It would take an astronomical amount of time to restore the quilt, which of course I'm willing to do, but that's not what Amy wanted.

Instead, she asked me to make 5 potholders out of the parts of the quilt that are not rotted through.

I started by laying the quilt out on the floor to get a good idea of what I was working with. Here's a photo of that. If you zoom in, you can see the deterioration through the center. The back was a plain muslin.

Spooky Quilt Front

Spooky Quilt Back

For anyone wondering, this block pattern is considered an "Equal Nine Patch" and goes by many different names, according to my copy of the Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns, compiled by Barbara Brackman (1993). Here's a sketch of the square and the many names:

p. 209 of Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns

These are all the names for this particular pattern

And, because I know Amy loves Mr. Show, we'll go with Hole-in-the-Barn-Door.

(Note: video link is not for the faint of heart, the easily offended or the generally humorless).

I started by opening the quilt up. As you all know, a quilt is a sandwich of a top, bottom & middle. The middle is the batting, and in this case it was old and bunched up, so I tossed it in the trash.

Insides of an old quilt

I absolutely adore the pink flowered fabric in this quilt. I love it so much! So, I decided to make the binding for the potholders out of this fabric. Which means I had so separate it from the rest of the quilt:

Lovely pink flowery fabric

In addition, I had to rip the "sandwich" apart, which just means I took out the quilting stitches. I isolated 10 squares that were in decent shape (almost all needed some repair).

Here are the 5 tops and 5 bottoms of the potholders:

I added a layer of heat reflective fabric and two layers of new batting to each potholder, then stitched them up with the pink flowery binding. Here they are:

Final Pot holders

All ready for Amy to give away to 5 lucky recipients.

(If I get really ambitious, I may ask for the carcass of the quilt back from Amy to restore. I think it would look amazing with neutral blacks & whites to replace all the stuff I cut out. But, that's a project for another day....)