Garage Sale Quilt Find

On Friday morning we went out to garage sales. We don't do this all the time, but it seems that in the spring, there can be some especially nice ones. I've always wanted to find a quilt at a garage sale. I have friends who have found wonderful ones for almost nothing. Well, this Friday was my turn.

I found a lovely hand pieced quilt top for $1. I couldn't believe it! It was carefully hand pieced, hand appliquéd, and hand embroidered. It had some small browns stains throughout, but I had a feeling that an Oxy - clean soak would take most if not all the dots away. I didn't think to do a before photo. What you see above is what it looked like after it came out of the wash machine, while it was drying on the couch. The quilt was much improved. The white was whiter, no colors were running, and the dots were almost all gone. It needs some ironing, but that will come next.


In this close up you can see a couple of the darkest dots up to the right of the right antenna of the butterfly. They are there, but they aren't strongly noticeable.

My plans are to find a backing for it, layer in come cotton batting, bind and tie it. I would love to hand quilt it, but I'm afraid it wouldn't be finished until I was too old to use it.

If anyone has a good idea of something else to try to completely remove the brown dots, without harming the fabric, let me know