Last night I took apart the hidden quilt piece. To do this, it's best to work from the back. Also, if the quilting stitches are small and dense it kind of takes forever to pick apart. Fortunately this maker used big, loose stitches for the fairly sparse quilting, so it only took about 45 minutes.
As soon as I started separating the backing from the hidden quilt I could see the maker used a fertilizer sack for half of it; the words nitrogen and potash printed on the fabric are still readable. This was pretty common about a hundred years ago. I don't think this quilt is quite that old; my best guess is that it was put together in the 30's or 40's.
Here is the back of the hidden quilt revealed.
The newer backing fabric; made of two different pieces of sacking.
The maker was so frugal she actually patched the newer backing fabric Japanese boro style.
This is what the quilt piece looked like from the front before I removed the top.
And here's the older quilt that was hidden inside. It's a nine-patch, probably made from old clothing (maybe men's shirts; the colors and prints seem masculine to me.) From the condition I would say (and this is only another guess) the hidden quilt is twenty years older than the newer quilt top.
A third piece of an older but different quilt was whip-stitched over a big hole in the hidden quilt, which created the multiple layers when viewed from the side.
So after all that I ended up with three different quilts in one piece. A very fun mystery to solve. :)
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