The Repurposed Life of a Quilt- Repair Tutorial

I'm sure a lot of you have a quilt that's lost its luster. Maybe a little too loved? The dog found it?
Well, I had a quilt that was ready to pitch. Yes, it was that bad. It had hours and hours of hand quilting on it. Feather design, wreath and grid on a simple little 9 patch and was an anniversary gift to my parents.

Little did we know what a bedspread with nylon backing could do to a pieced and quilted quilt! OUCH! 


This is just a small section of the top of the quilt. The nylon comforter that my Mom put over the quilt ATE it! Yep, like a pac-man...just ate up the cotton and totally destroyed it. Well, ALMOST.
I wasn't going to let all that work and those vintage blocks go to the trash. I had to DO something!
So, when necessity is the mother of invention, right?
So, I put together a cotton print for the new back, turned the quilt backwards (top now being Inside) and not only hid the unsightly, chewed mess, but came out with a New quilt!
I'll try to show you the pix of progress on this. Little did I think at the time that I would be using this on a blog or would have taken better pix!
So, step 1- showing the picture and trying to calm the churning stomach at the destruction

2. Ok, I'm over that, now...time to get to work. It was a shame in the first place that I quilted so heavily in the dark brown print border, but I did. You can't really see it, but that's feather plumes around the entire quilt in the border. 
   
   
   
   

This shows the back of the original quilt. See why I wanted to keep it!? Lots of outline on the Flying Geese, grid, and of course, the feather plumes.
Ok....eaaazy, peezy.
1. I just found the cotton print I wanted for the new backing.

2. I turned the quilt so that the back was now the Top of the quilt. The back (which is the gnarled former top) is now going to be on the Inside of the quilt.
   
3. The new back is a green print (why,I don't know, but it works)
   
4. Voila! I not only have a 'new' quilt, it's more of a Whole Cloth quilt.
   
   
   
   

I couldn't let it just go like that. That's against my grain (pardon the pun). I HAD to applique to spruce it up a tad. Now, this was several years ago that I did this and used hand-dyed cottons for the Dogwood applique design and embroidery floss for the stems and leaves.
After taking the pix for this blog, I was Aghast....no, I was a Quilter but still....
The Dogwood applique was soooo faded! I hadn't realized it until then. So, to carry on my never-ending OCD....I Re-applique the Dogwood. It's easy to do. I didn't take off the old, I just applique Over the existing. This is also hand dyed cotton, so in another three years or so, I'll probably be doing this again. I might even go ahead and applique the stems and leaves like I planned to to begin with :)

To hold the three layers together, I used tiny ties/tacks. I started from the top side and took the tie to the back side and clipped closely to the backing fabric so it's pretty much invisible.
So, there ya go! Have any questions? Just ask :)
  Finished product:

Now, I have a dear, dear friend who takes beautiful pictures and has software to clean them up, edit, etc...as soon as she sees this tute...I'm SURE she'll want to grab these pix and re-do them! LOL....well, she can but I'll leave these up until then!