More progress on my Dresden plates

At the last quilting bee meeting, I was complaining about how ridiculous it is that I only have four more Dresden plate blocks left to do, yet they continue to just sit there collecting dust.  No sooner were the words out of my mouth, that I made a pack to myself to get them done.

I love these blocks.  They are estimated to be from the '30-'40's.  Many of the petals are feed sacks.  The Dresden plates were previously appliqued to feed sacks that were disintegrating. The blocks were also assembled into a top, but never quilted.

In order to preserve the Dresden plate fabrics, I am reconstruction the quilt.  I washed the quilt top first, figuring that if the material could not make it through the wash, it should not be used.  I gently unstitched all the plates,  ironed them, trimmed them a consistent size and reassembled them.  There were only a few of the fabrics that were disintegrating.  I was able to replace them with other authentic period fabrics from my small reserve.  

To keep the quilt as close to the original quilt, I am using unbleached muslin, which closely resembled to feed sacks that were used.  I also found an identical blue for the sashing and borders (not shown here).

Since our meetings are on a Wednesday's and Thursday's are my late night, I had a couple of hours in the morning to work on these, and since it was going so well I decided to continue them into the evening after work.

So now, I have two more done and only two more left to go!

I am getting so excited about finally finishing this quilt!!