Handmade story

When my mom was in high school in the 1920s she contracted rheumatic fever.  As a result, she had to stay home, in bed, for nearly a year.  She read, she did jigsaw puzzles, and crossword puzzles, and wrote letters, and did her school work.  Finally, her mother brought her some old dresses and blouses, and a cardboard template and scissors, and showed her how to make a quilt.  This is the result of her year in bed.  She pieced all the squares by hand, appliqueing down all the diamonds which she had cut from her and her mother's old dresses and blouses. Her mother pieced the top together, then showed my mother how to hand quilt the top.  Over the years some of the fabrics have just worn out...they were worn to begin with, and time has not been their friend.  I love the colors and the prints and the hodgepodge manner that the stars are pieced; there is no rhyme nor reason to how she put them together, no planned color arrangement, just whatever diamond she had at hand.  I am too much of a control freak in my quilting to do that, so every so often I have to take this quilt out and look at it to remind myself that randomness works.

The quilt is stained and as you can see below, some of the individual diamonds are falling apart.  I am concerned about washing it, even using conservation methods, because some of the fabrics are in such delicate condition.  I could cut the quilt apart and make a teddy bear out of the better sections, but I always feel like a heathen desecrating a shrine whenever I cut apart an old quilt to reuse it.  I wonder about the fabrics--who wore which one?  What kind of dress was it?  I know that each of those stitches were made by a young teen-age girl, forced by illness to spend days and weeks and months in bed, in a chair, on a sofa, inactive, when everyone else around her was enjoying life to its fullest.  Every stitch tells me a story.