So – now the quilt top is finished, and it’s time to find fabric for the back.

Many quilters wait until their top is finished to even begin to think about what to use for the back – including me!  And, often, by the time we get to the backing there isn’t enough fabric left over.  What to do?

Actually, you have several options:

  • choose a completely different fabric – one that isn’t in your quilt top
  • make quilt blocks for the backing – using either left over fabric from the quilt top or new fabric
  • sew strips together to make a piece large enough for the back of your quilt

Bubba's Ocean Waves Quilt

In my early quilting days, I thought the backing needed to be all one piece of fabric – or at least pieces of the same fabric sewn together.  Then I made a quilt for engineering son Bubba, using some special Pima cotton I found at a random fabric shop.

By the time the quilt top was finished, the shop didn’t have any more Pima cotton.  Yup, this was a really random fabric shop.  The owner just got bolts of fabric that were left over from the manufacturers, so the prices were excellent.

But it was like shopping at the 99-cent store – you could never count on anything being there the next time around.

Now what?

I didn’t want to mix my beautiful Pima cotton with regular calicoes (yes, it was that long ago!).

I had some fairly wide strips of fabric left in some of the colors.  So, I simply sewed them together, looking like rectangles, until the piece was large enough for the backing.

It ended up looking pretty good, and the seams weren’t too difficult to manage as I was quilting the quilt.  The biggest problem in the quilting was that the thread count was so high (just like a batik), it was almost impossible to quilt through.

You’ll see pictures of the front and back of the quilt as well as links to other articles about unique backings for your quilts:

http://www.how-to-quilt.com/articles/2402-backing-quilts.php

Happy Quilting!

Penny