My friend, Pete’s, mother, Sue, has moved and downsized and Pete is going through the POD with the last items that she couldn’t decide what to do with. He asked me to look at some of the quilts.
Pete explained that a lot of them were not family quilts. Many were salvaged from a moving crew who had used them to pad furniture during one of his parents’ moves long ago. they weren’t in good shape then and time had not made them better. Pete laid them out just before I got there. Seeing quilts on a driveway… that doesn’t happen often, does it? But the drive was clean and it did make it easy to see them all quickly.
These quilts would have been wonderful in their younger years but that was then. In the here and now, these quilts are falling apart.
It’s as if the fabric itself is giving up.
These have all been washed a lot and the cotton batting was in clumps in most of them. It makes me very happy that we have good batting today. I will be more grateful when I open my next bag of batting.
This one was worth saving, and Pete spotted a woven ‘Made by Sue Schulze’ label on the back with the date 1970. We think she did what was common in her family and finished up old blocks that had been left to her.
The outer edge isn’t bound—it has inset with big rickrack. Part of one edge is kind of chewed up and if it was me, I would just cut off the dangly parts and leave it alone. I told Pete how to wash it gently and I’ll give him some Retro Clean that might take out some of the stains.
The rest of the quilts will most likely be thrown away. I feel like I should feel worse about that than I do, but I don’t. These quilts lived productive lives and were cuddled along the way and like most things in this world, quilts will not last forever.
It’s like the universe is sending me a message…
Piece O Cake Blog 