Look at the ragged treasure of a quilt I found for two dollars. I could see the potential in the dirty, ragged quilt they were selling for dog bedding! Our recycling center here in Madison County, Arkansas gives me a chance to shop when I drop off my sorted items. It is a poor county, yet we have access to a large recycling center. A dedicated core of local citizens over a decade ago pushed local government to fund the Recycling and Transfer Center as it is called. Any reusable items donated to the recycling center are offered for sale in the adjacent resale shop. Books, clothes, flower pots, tools and more can be recycled to my house for a small fee.

As an avid quilter and amateur quilt historian I was excited by the graphic sunrise design on the tattered quilt made circa 1930. It had seen hard use as the batting was coming out of threadbare fabric in many places on the top and one edge was torn and tattered. But the biggest problem was how dirty it was. I could not begin my repair efforts until I had washed this quilt. And that would be a risk. It could disintegrate in the washing machine. I stabilized all the weak areas with multiple safety pins to minimize the affects of agitating the quilt in water. I used a commercial washing machine because those machines tumble the clothes.

My risk paid off. I now had a clean quilt to restore. I named the quilt Golden Sunrise. An Arkansas woman unknown to me had hand pieced and hand quilted the blocks and added triple sashing and border to create a bright and cheerful quilt for herself and her family. I decided the ragged border on one edge was beyond repair, so I cut that border off and sewed a new binding around the whole outer edge. It looked good except for the batting popping out in many spots.

I used the trick of applying a circle of fine beige tulle or net over the delicate spots and carefully stitching the tulle to strong sections of the quilt. Once this is done the repair is nearly invisible even up close. As you can see from a distance in the picture, the quilt looks intact. I believe I spent about one hundred hours recreating this beautiful piece of folk art. I added a label noting where I found the quilt and documenting my repairs because I had become a co-creator of this treasure.

Sharing My Vision

Last weekend my Golden Sunrise quilt was a centerpiece of the special exhibit I put together called “The Drama of Two Color Quilts.” Three different groups of school children visited my booth at our Quilt Guild’s biennial quilt show at the Springdale Holiday Inn Convention Center. I showed them the vintage coke bottle with a sprinkle top on it for sprinkling clothes before steam irons were invented. I used a sprinkler like this almost every day growing up in Miami, Florida in the 1950s. Many of their eyes widened at my story of our putting the rolled up, sprinkled clothes in the refeigerator if we had to leave off the ironing for awhile. Some seemed to believe that I was “pullling their leg”, but I explained that once damp we wanted to keep the clothes damp without going sour until we could accomplish the ironing. Then I showed them the heavy iron that I currently use by heating it on top of my wood stove. I explained that our only source of power was the solar energy form solar panels on our roof, so we were very careful about any electricity we used each day. This was how I iron my quilt projects all winter. I pointed out that I was using energy that would have gone unused. I commented that irons and refrigerators are some of the largest energy hogs in our households. One boy spoke up and said that some things like a TV even use energy when not turned on. Obviously someone in his life is talking about energy use in a positive way.

When I pointed out the gold quilt on display and described the ragged and dirty quilt sold as dog bedding for two dollars I had their attention. This was a “rags to riches story” to capture their imagination. In fact, the next day at the show one of the teachers told me that she had asked the students to write about their experience at the quilt show. One girl had carefully listened to each detail about the quilt discovery and the restoration because she described it all in detail in her paper.

As a school girl, I had a strong reaction to learning about all the tons of rich topsoil lost to erosion because of not plowing fields following the contour of the land. I remember being concerned about the loss of soil and then the harm all the soil caused in the waterways. My young adult career did not reflect that concern, but it was planted deep in my consciousness! When Jeanne and I began to build our homestead in 1987, we knew we wanted our raised beds to follow the contours of the mountainside. Perhaps my story of seeing treasures in ragged quilts and of living off the grid will remain an influence about possibilities with some of those young people.

Photo credits:Each of these photos was taken by Judy VanderHam at the April, 2009 show sponsored by the Northwest Arkansas Quilt Guild. We thank Judy for her generous assistance!

In my arms is an antique indigo blue and tan woven coverlet. I imagine a possible history because it has no spoken history. Sally, a dear quilter friend, moved from northwest Arkansas to Washington state several years ago and gave me this ancient blue and tan coverlet. I had never touched a woven coverlet before. This treasure smelled musty. It is in poor condition and has lost its provenance. But there are clues in the warp and weft to help me recreate the history!

I have finally aired it out enough to be able to work on it.

But, why would someone want to work on this tattered textile? It has huge holes and the sections sewing the 36 inch widths together have pulled apart and unraveled in many places. It is big: 72 inches by 86 inches, and it is heavy.

Woven into the bottom left corner is the information. “Property of L.S. Orleans County.” The next line of letters is missing most of the parts of the letters due to unraveling. My atlas tells me there is an Orleans County in New York state just west of the Finger Lakes region where my father grew up.

The warp seems to be a tan linen and the weft is a dark indigo wool. Since it was reversible, I had to choose which side to use as the right side. I chose the side where the indigo color is the predominate color. I am stabilizing the large holes using cotton thread and a appropriate color cotton fabric behind the holes. I have already used a thousand stitches, I am sure, in the eight hours I have spent starting the repair. The repairs look good. None are glaringly visible. My goal is to stabilize this fragile textile (or someone is going to throw it out someday).

I appreciate each of the unknown women who did not thow it out in the last 159 years. None are my biological ancestors, yet I have a lot in common with those women. I value the textile and the woman who used her life energy to create it. I believe a woman used her home loom to weave this coverlet about 1850. The intricate design of eagles, stars and wreaths would probably have taken years to create!

I hope to have it repaired by the end of the month to be included in the special exhibit (The Drama of Two-Color Quilts) I am doing for our guild’s biennial quilt show. I am speculating that two-color coverlets were one part of the inspiration women had for creating two-color quilts. Doing something to repair the ragged edges of the coverlet is the next challenge.

I have found the web site for the National Museum for the American Coverlet, but if you have other recommendations to me about learning more about coverlets I would appreciate it.

Why spend my life energy doing this repair? My needle is a magic tool humans have used for thousands of years. My sterling thimble was used by another woman before me. The work is tactile and direct. I can visualize the whole and I can use my needle and thread–simple tools– to make it happen. It is everyday honest magic.