Vintage Lone Star Repair

This post is about how I got involved in repairing a vintage quilt Lone Star quilt. The quilt started on my daughters work table—she specializes in commissioned quilting services—pieced by a clients grandmother from clothing remnants decades ago. The problem was the fabric used exclusively in the center eight blocks disintegrated and the star motif needed 4 square and 4 triangle background pieces to finish the quilt top. In truth, the client said that IF the middle blocks were replaced she would settle for an appliqued quilt my daughter would then long arm stitch.

My daughter and I barbered quilting services, I agreed to piece the center and she agreed to putting my custom machine quilting project ahead of other projects she had in her queue.

The artisan who created this quilt utilized solid piecing skills to machine sew this quilt top. They used a short stitch length and consistent seam allowances which made the block replacement manageable. The challenge involved removing multiple stitch lines and creating the eight Y seams.

The damaged diamonds were a uniform 2 1/2 inch and were replaced with a similar color fabric provided by the client. I used a FriXion pen to mark all 4 seams on the backside of the new blocks and used the previous tiny fabric holes to line up the new seams which were put in by hand. Once all the new diamonds were set and ironed, the hand seams were reinforced with machine stitching.

The client chose quilt top fabric with a subtle direction which increased the difficulty of finishing the quilt. The four corner blocks were set first, with special attention to the orientation of the fabric. Two of the triangles triangle blocks were fussy cut (cut against the grain) and the four triangle blocks added. A border was added to allow the star motif to float on the quilt top. Two of the 6 inch border were fussy cut and the border corners were mitered.

Close-up of machine stitching on repaired vintage Lone Star quilt.