Saving a treasure

I love quilts. In fact, I love all vintage textiles. Textiles and tableware -- those are my Achilles Heel. I love to go to antique stores because they inspire all sorts of creativity in me, but they are dangerous. Have you ever noticed how many beautiful embroidered linens there are out there? And the china! Oh. my. goodness.

Anyway, my birthday was earlier this month and I had a bit of money to spend, so the other day, I visited one of my favorite antique shops. I found a gorgeous quilt. Made of 1930's feedsacks, it was a very unusual pattern called Arkansas Star. It had a teeny bit of damage to just one small piece of fabric, but I knew that my mother-in-law-the-brilliant-seamstress could fix that easily. It also had some large and significant brown stains on it. The price was low because of the stains.

I brought it home and decided to wash it. I know that some folks suggest that antique quilts shouldn't be washed in a washing machine. They are probably right about that, but I want to actually use these things, so I decided to give it and the quilt pictured above a good wash. I filled up the washing machine with really hot water, added a couple of scoops of OxyClean, agitated the tub a bit to mix up the OxyClean and then added the quilt. The water immediately turned brown and smelly. I let it soak overnight in the machine. The following morning, I added some detergent and washed it on a regular cycle. With trepidation, I pulled it out after the cycle was done, and...


I have a beautiful quilt! The whites are actually white! The colors are still vibrant! I hung it on the back of my couch to dry for a few hours, then stuck it in the dryer after I got tired of waiting for it to dry. It smelled so fresh and clean and it looks just gorgeous on my daughter's shabby iron bed! I'm not going to leave it on there until I get the torn part fixed, but I'm so excited that the OxyClean did such a great job! Isn't it pretty?