A few days ago a friend passed on to me a quilt top she had purchased many years ago in England. It is made of silks and still has much of the paper used to piece it (say that three times fast) basted on the back.
The silks are tougher for me to date than cottons but the writing and the advertisement pieces provide clues. I'm thinking circa 1900...what do you think?
As much as I love the papers on the back they may have contributed to some of the deterioration of the silk. There is acid in the paper and that isn't good for the fabrics.
Years ago I found a cotton EPP with the paper. I carefully removed the papers and put them in an acid free envelope for safekeeping. Like this quilt, there was a lot of writing on the papers and I hoped to gain some insight into who and where the quilt-top was made by looking through them.
I'm going to keep the piece as it is and use it as a study piece. I will wrap it in acid free paper and keep it in an acid free box with some other blocks from the same time period.
