Picking up the pieces, cleaning up the mess....

BUT.....about that youngest grandson(who is sooo much like his Daddy!) the little gal in this picture(his step-mom-to-be)snapped that memorable picture on Saturday...LOL And why did he look soooo disagreeable? Well, that was the 4th or 5th "take".
He has a trick of looking at the camera, and just as you snap the picture, he looks away...so, they take another, and another, etc. He gets pretty tired of it!!! LOL I couldn't resist showing it to you...*VBS* At 4, he has A LOT of opinions!
This is one of the older "used" tops in my collection. I love Bow Tie as a quilt pattern,buying them whenever I come across them(if I can). This was a tied quilt, that seemed unusually heavy to me.. It held up quite well to the wear and tear of the years, and I could have just left it as it was. But I snipped the yarn tied and pulled them out, wanting to 'rescue' the top and hand quilt it. What was inside was a very thin old quilt. Since it was crumbling into shreds, I discarded it, but saved the backing.
The blocks are machine pieced, with many stitches per inch. That makes repairs MUCH harder. I was talking with someone that was replacing(or thinking of) black that was in shreds. In this quilt top, the only fabric that is disintrigating in this one. Not the check bow tie, but the background with the lavender and narrow black stripe. It's the narrow black lines that are turning to dust in my fingers. Soooo, one by one, I've been replacing the background on those blocks. This is a "before" picture, one I haven't done as yet.And this is an "after" picture. I'm lucky enough to have a large, large collection of vintage fabric dating back to the mid 1800's. I don't have alot of shirtings, and if I come across a child's shirt with handmade button holes(this tan background was one of those) I buy it and use it for repairs in old quilts. It'a a slow process to pick out the tiny, tiny treadle stitches, but it can be done. I carefully iron one of the removed pieces, and check it against one of the bow tie segments, before I cut the replacement background. I hand stitch the new backgrounds into place, the same way you'd piece the traditional bow tie block. A careful pressing and it's good as new.
I have about 4 more backgrounds to replace and then I can baste this top with a very light weight batt and hand quilt it. It's a very thin top due to the fabrics that were used. Mostly summer dress or shirt weight cottons. But I love it, and I love the vintage look of it. That means I think it's worth the time to hand quilt it...*VBS*