Ps 150

I was recently asked by a family friend to look at a quilt top that her grandmother had started, but died before she could finish. She had found it when her mother died and was going through her mother's things. It had been stuffed in her mother's attic since at least the 1950's when her grandmother passed, so it's been through a lot of aging. It's an all muslin quilt top, with beautiful redwork designs. It was never finished. She had done the redwork designs on each block, had sewn the blocks into the top and had started to do a hand embroidery design between the blocks.

I was asked by this family friend to finish the hand embroidery and to finish the quilt all together. At first she didn't even know if it could be salvaged. She had thought about tossing it if it couldn't be finished! Thankfully, she sought advice first. My plan is to finish the hand embroidery, but with age comes age spots and this top has them. Being that it's a redwork design, all hand embroidered, I don't want to trust it to my washer, even on the delicate cycle. How would you go about cleaning out the age spots on antique muslin and perhaps preventing bleeding from the embroidery threads?