Vicki that is so neat! What a treat to find out more about the people who possibly made the quilt. My husband is on ancestry.com. I'll give him the names and he might be able to find out some more information. Thank you!
Kas--that is a great tip for washing. It really needs it, its so dingy. The screen idea sounds really cool. I have a large area in the front I can lay it out to dry, but of course definitely waiting until spring!
All: I spent awhile looking at the quilt last night and formulating my plan of attack. This is what I came up with so far. The edge that has the most damaged block also has for some reason an extra wide piece of binding. (the other side, and most of the quilt shows binding maybe like 1" or less wide, but the end I wanted to cut was nearly 4 or so " of binding. I'm trying the following, since I want to avoid having to cut into the quilting itself and securing all that if I don't have to. I went ahead and unraveled the binding on the side and cut off the excess so it will match the binding on the rest of the quilt. That gave me some extra material to make repairs. I am hoping I have enough! I figure I will use up all that material on the front of the quilt. If I run out by the time I need to repair the back, I am hoping I can get some feedsacks of a similar age to use as repair since it won't be seen like the front will.
I started this today so I will keep updating! What's neat too when I exposed the binding near those blocks I could see their original bright colors (on the edges hidden inside the quilt under the binding). What is now a faded dingy light blue was once brilliant, like our reply buttons on the forum here. Can't wait to get this quilt back in shape!