Ok, I took the advice on here and looked it over a bit closer and took an iron to it. I hadn’t realized the whole thing is hand stitched. The fabric seems to be in decent shape, not rotting although it’s clear that it had some mildew or something on it at one point and someone washed it. I’ve got two things running around in my head:
First, My grandmother was a seamstress and this is the only thing I have from her that she has sewn. We moved away from her when I was very little so we were not close. There was another quilt, I’m assuming in much better shape that my aunts and cousins finished with her while she was on her deathbed and gave to another granddaughter. I have some feelings about that... given that I’m the one in the family who loves quilts and have never been given one but I think I need to get past that and basically take what I can get, which is this one.
Secondly, I don’t really like the design all that much. I seems to be growing on me a little bit the more I go back and look at it again and again trying to appreciate it, but there is something about the shape of her butterflies that bugs me. LOL! Silly thing... I know!
Her hand stitching is really nice. I can only imagine how much time she spent on this, it’s a pretty good sized top. It feels like it would be doing it an injustice to take a machine to it at this point. I don’t know... what do you think?