That silky green fabric is some kind of godawful acrylic that my kid found when shopping for new bedroom curtains a few years ago, and I pieced the scraps liberally into her quilt to remind her of home. But it looks like a .25″ seam and regular stitching wasn’t enough to keep the top and bottom edges from separating, dang it. It turns out that I don’t necessarily have to mend a quilt, per se, as much as I have to mend this gosh-darn cussedy-cuss cuss fabric. And just between us, I hadn’t been over-generous on the quilting that I’d done on my home machine. I definitely knew better, but quilting on a home sewing machine is such an ordeal. Lesson learned: better to spend the time properly quilting in the first place than have to come back and mend a quilt later. Anyway, at least it’s an easy fix! If you’ve got a ripped or split seam or two on a quilt that you’ve loved a little too hard, here’s how to mend a quilt to make it as good as new–better, actually, because we’re going to reinforce that seam while we repair it!
Materials
You will need:
double-sided fusible webbing. Choose a very lightweight version, something like Stitch Witchery or Steam a Seam. You want to mend a quilt without making parts of it feel stiff, like they would with a heavyweight interfacing. thread to match the top fabric. I like the aesthetic of visible mending, so I used embroidery floss in a slightly contrasting color, but if you want a nearly invisible mend, choose thread that matches the top fabric.
Step 1: Trim away long threads, and apply the fusible webbing.
Cut a piece of fusible webbing about as big as you can get away with. In the photo above, I cut my webbing the width of the space between stitching lines, and long enough to extend for an inch or two on either side of the separation. To be honest, if I had to do it again, I would have tried to extend the length of the webbing piece to go as far down that green block as I could, because I won’t be surprised if I spend a couple of hours over the summer mending more splits in that janky fabric, sigh. With your fiddly fingers or a crochet hook, insert the fusible webbing patch between the quilt top and the batting, making sure it covers the entirety of the split. Carefully arrange the quilt top above the patch so that the split meets with no gaps, then iron the quilt so that the fusible webbing is adhered to the quilt top and the batting. A mini iron isn’t necessary, but does come in VERY handy for projects like this!
Step 2: Satin stitch over the rip.
At this point the seam is actually pretty well mended and reinforced, but you still need to cover over those raw edges. If you don’t care what the back of the quilt looks like and you can fit this part of the quilt in your home machine, you could just satin stitch over the rip with a short and wide zigzag stitch. The stitching on the back will look out of place in the rest of your quilting, but it’ll be quickly done and very sturdy! If you don’t want the stitching to show from the back, or you can’t fit your quilt in your home machine, you can hand stitch the same satin stitch, making sure that you do not catch the backing fabric in your stitches. I’m sorry to say that my satin stitching in the above photo is not very tidy, but I was actually just kind of trying to fit it in between patrons during my mending group’s monthly open house at our public library, so the process was something like sew five stitches, pause to patch holes in the knees of someone’s jeans, sew another fifteen stitches that somehow don’t quite match the previous five, pause to reattach the handle of someone’s favorite tote bag, sew a few more stitches but don’t really look at what I’m doing because I’m too busy gossiping with another group member about something that happened five years ago (gossip NEVER gets old!), etc. So yes, that seam looks low-key like trash, but I ALSO patched two knees and one crotch, sewed two tote bag handles (breaking an equivalent two needles in the process, sigh), darned I can’t even tell you how many holes, repaired three pockets, and taught a child how to stitch up a rip in her coat all by herself. If you suspect that the rip you’re repairing is due to a particular fabric or type of seam, you can prophylactically satin stitch other potentially problematic areas before they rip. This means that you won’t be able to reinforce those spots internally with the fusible webbing, but it causes less damage altogether if you can keep them from ripping at all. I also added some additional quilting that wouldn’t look too out of place around that suspect fabric in this quilt, which will hopefully aid its overall sturdiness. My takeaways from this particular project: I won’t say that I’ll never use those particular green fabric scraps again, because I do value their sentiment, but I’ll definitely reinforce them with some lightweight interfacing next time. I also need to just lean into the backbreaking (or at least back muscle wrenching!) labor of quilting my next project more densely. I usually think of quilting as mostly aesthetic, but it does real work to stabilize and reinforce that finished quilt!
