I have been working on a red and white Irish Chain quilt for a while now. The quilt is made up of extra blocks and partial blocks for a raffle quilt I organized several years ago. This year I decided to use the extra fabric and blocks and create a nice napping quilt for my mom. It's a traditional design, so I wanted to use traditional quilting designs. Each of the alternate (white) blocks is quilted with a feathered wreath with the background filled in with a small grid. The borders are filled with feathers.
After doing the work of marking and quilting this baby within an inch (literally) of it's life, I soaked it to remove the marking pen and to prepare it for blocking. As I pulled the quilt from the washer, my heart sank. The red fabrics ran. I KNEW that I had prewashed my fabric but somehow it still ran. My only hope was to try and see if I could somehow, please Lord, find a way to remove the dye. I ran the quilt through another hand wash sequence with Synthrapol and a Color Catcher. This removed all of the running areas throughout the body of the quilt, but the outside border was still decidedly pink. I ran it through several more times (I lost count. I was in a daze. I was shell shocked.) but still was only able to remove a small bit.
So, as you can see from the picture of the quilt, the border does have a darker tone. It did, however, run consistently.
Maybe my mom won't notice....
