This quilt was given to me by a lady who had bought it from an interior design shop in London in the 1950s and it had been well-used and well-loved. She wanted to know if she could repair it, as she wanted to keep on using it, but it's obviously beyond mending. Even if the rotten fabrics were taken out, any new work would weaken the whole, and it would quickly disintegrate. She kindly left it with me, and I blush to think that I've kept it for four years! My original thought was that I would make her a replacement, and see if she would swap, but it's taken me rather a long time to get the replacement finished! However, here it is!
It's pretty big, and even DS's long arms couldn't display the whole thing. I'm really pleased with it (even DH, who's usually laid back about quilts - he's seen them all - described it as 'stunning') and hope the lady will agree to the swap. There is a quilt documentation day at Bletchley Park on 25th February which I'm hoping to take the old quilt to, so keep your fingers crossed!
As you can see, it's all layered up and mostly quilted. So why did it turn into a UFO? At the time, I was trying to create some semblance of an antique quilt, and wanted to incorporate some period quilting designs. On the large section with half square triangles I decided to do some wine glass shapes (interlocking circles), and merrily set off to machine quilt them. Although I've successfully free-machine quilted many time in the past, this did not go well at all. And instead of facing up to the fact that it just looked a mess, I continued, until the whole area was quilted, and it looked terrible! Even my good friend Jackie had to agree that it really needed to come out. Rats! The thought of undoing that much machine quilting made me put the quilt back into the cupboard, until Christmas, when I finally had plenty of chill time to tackle the task. 