Crazy Fixes

I'm going to frame and hang this crazy quilted block in my work room as inspiration and a stitch reference. About 30% of the patches are fraying, shattering, and soiled; and two are missing, so I'm going to do some repair work to the patchwork first. Since we have new puppies I'll have to do this a little at a time, too.

My goal is always to preserve as much of the original work and fabric as possible, but I also like to add my own touches since I'm becoming part of its history. As it's just a block this piece is also not important or valuable. If you have a crazy quilt you want to preserve, the best way to do that is to have it appraised, and then (if it's worth the cost) have a professional vintage quilt restorer do the repairs.

My first task was to spot-clean some patches that have been soiled. I do this with my own cleaning solution for crazy quilts (which almost always cannot be washed or even immersed in water.) Basically that's cold water plus a tiny bit of mild detergent in a bowl, and I use a corner of a sponge to apply it. I also blot dry the patch I spot-clean after each time I apply the cleaning solution so the water doesn't spread to other patches.

These two patches have some staining on them -- possibly spilled food (the stains look too light to be blood, and too brown to be rust.)

For these two patches I was able to clean most of the stain from the striped silk using this method, but the blue patch seems to be permanently stained. I did remove the surface debris from the blue patch.

After I let the block dry completely I covered the stain on the blue patch with some vintage lace and added my own embroidery. Since the striped silk patch was shattering I also added a little strip of lace to cover the damaged area.

This red silk patch looks okay at first glance, but it's badly frayed on one end and splitting in several places. Rather than cover the patch with lace I scattered stitches in a matching metallic thread all over it to hold the silk threads in place.

I really like the effect of scatter stitching, and it doesn't take away from the original fabric.

For a black silk patch that had a big split down the middle I sewed a bandaid of sorts with some hand-dyed silk ribbon.

From what I've heard at quilt shows the traditional way to repair a genuine vintage crazy quilt is to sew some lace over the damaged area. I don't disagree with this if only minor repairs are needed, but if most of the silks are shattering and you keep repairing it, over time you'll just end up with a lace-covered quilt. That's why I came up with alternative approaches.

Once I finish the repairs I'll post before and after pics so you can see the end result.