Last night I took apart the hidden quilt piece. To do this, it's best to work from the back. Also, if the quilting stitches are small and dense it can take a very long time to pick apart. Fortunately this maker used big, loose stitches for the fairly sparse quilting, so I got it apart in about 45 minutes.
As soon as I started separating the backing from the hidden quilt I could see the maker used a fertilizer sack for half of it; the words nitrogen and potash printed on the fabric are still readable. This was pretty common about a hundred years ago.
Here is the back of the hidden quilt revealed.
The newer backing fabric; made of two different pieces of sacking.
The maker was so frugal she actually patched the newer backing fabric Japanese boro style.
This is what the quilt piece looked like from the front before I removed the top.
Here's the older quilt that was hidden inside. It's a nine-patch, probably made from old clothing.
A third piece of an older but different quilt was whip-stitched over a big hole in the hidden quilt, which created the multiple layers when viewed from the side.
So after all that I ended up with three different quilts in one piece. A very fun mystery to solve. :)
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