Bad Mouse, Bad Mouse! ... Or the "Step by Step of My Quilt Repair"

Hello, hello everyone! I'm Wendy from Why Knot? and when I saw that Madame Samm was asking for tutorials, I dared to peek my nose outta my little corner of the world and thought to myself "Why Knot offer to share this tutorial with Stash Manicure's amazing readers?"  Good thing I hadn't gotten out of bed yet when I received her reply that morning, otherwise I probably would've been flat out on the floor!  How ironic that I, a mouse of a person, have this tutorial to share ... but seriously, I couldn't pass up the opportunity in these times of saving our pennies, nickels and dimes ... So, Madame Samm, and all of you amazing readers, I humbly thank you for the honor of posting here today!!

Has one of you precious quilt ever unintentionally come in contact with a dog ... or a mouse, or a whole family of mice? Or, as our weather systems seem to be so consistently inconsistent, sustain tornado damage, flood stains or wildfire scorches?

Well, I recently had a call from a lady desperately seeking someone to repair a damaged quilt.  Her sister had proudly presented it to her as a gift and within a week, someone left the door open for the family dog to access the room with said prized quilt. Oops!
Needless to say, the lady has not yet told her sister what happened to this very dear present.  When she called me, in December, I told her I’d happily help her, if she could find matching fabric for which I could make repairs. I then directed her to my very friendly LQS shopkeeper with her damaged prize.

Well, the same lady has called me again, five month's later, very proudly stating she's found matching material and asked if I was still interested in helping her get this precious quilt repaired.  I repeated that I would need to see the damage first, but that I could give it my best.  I did mention that depending on damage, costs might be a little high and, she rushed to say that at this point if it cost $1,000, she didn’t care.



I share this story with you because as I was talking with a friend about this story, she asked if it was possible to repair damage to a quilt as I described.  It got me to thinking that while most all of us share tips on creating quilts, I haven’t seen too many posts on repair work.  Follow me? J So ....

A while back, I had this quilt brought to me with “mouse damage” and, (this was a year before blogging even entered my brain's realm of thought) though I was pretty happy taking on this challenge, I wanted proof of what the quilt looked like before I began repairs and what it would look like after my repairs.  (If this sounds like I was trying to cover my hiney, you’re absolutely right J)   Okay, enough with my words, I'll let my pictures speak for me now:

This is mouse damage from the front side … note binding, batting, and hole through to the backside.

This is the damage from the backside of quilt.

After carefully removing all stitching in damaged areas, I squared off material to be cut and removed. In doing so, you can see more extensive damage to the batting.

I repeated the same steps with the batting since damage encompassed a couple of areas.  You will note on the backside of the quilt only a small portion was damaged so I carefully cut out the chewed up section so I could replace with a smaller piece of matching material.  Also, because the backing was not pieced, there was no easy “designation” of where to cut and piece a repair, so I chose to use a patch here instead of making the repair look so obvious on the back.

If you look closely, you will see that I cut a matching patch for the hole and used matching thread to zig-zag stitch the repair on the back … looks a little rough right now, but wait, it gets better!

Once the backing was patched I cut a piece of batting to replace that which I removed and stitched it in place, also with a zig-zag stitch.  Next was the trickiest part in making the repair look good …

Using a matching rectangle of fabric, I first sewed the left and right sides to the border.  You can probably notice the fading difference of where the seams join the two pieces of fabric.  Once the side seams were made, I joined the light blue border to the darker blue border.  I then added fabric to the binding section and completed the repair with stippling to match that which was done in the rest of the border.

Front side.  For reference purposes, I marked the repaired section with pencil and quarter-inch marker.

Back side of quilt.  Seriously J repair work can be done ... this was my very first repair job. J lol

Thank you for stepping through this repair with me.  Maybe this little tutorial will help save you a dime, nickel, and penny by making a repair yourself before sending the pretty away to someone like me, or gifting same precious “damaged” quilt to your dog’s house.

I will post pictures of the doggie damaged quilt once the quilt is repaired on my blog over at Why Knot? so please be sure to check back in with me to see how I make out repairing precious pup's damage :)

Next time, ask yourself "Why Knot?" and try it yourself ... you just might be surprised!

Wendy


Editors note....


Thanks to Wendy for this amazing post...OK< I don't believe we have ever had this topic...sew be forewarned, mice, rats, dogs...OH MY...lol Wendy has the band-aid....lol
( or rather the stitch, patch, finesse..you know what I mean) lol

And our winner.....

DEBBIE M 

#41

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