Showing the Quilt Backs

Belinda of Brown Dirt Cottage is doing a blog link of quilters that love to see and learn about pieced quilt backs. Since that is something I love too, I have decided to join in the fun.

Shown here is a quilt of mine that happens to be one of my favorites!I love it because of its bright colors and its cottage garden theme. I made it from Linda Sheroney's book called "You Can Sew Quilt". I took a class from her and she taught the technique right from the book.

The directions were to use some of the fat quarters to piece the back and bits and pieces from cutting the front that were not used on the quilt top do get used when piecing the back in chunks. I love working this way and have done many quilts since trying it for the first time with Linda.

The front of this vintage quilt started as a topper that was given to me by my mother-in-law, Cecelia. Perhaps she saw it on e-bay and thought I could do something with it. She was right. I fixed up the badly sewn blocks and repaired some seams of which there were quite a few. I shopped for some country style yellows, blues and reds to make the borders. Then I made some additional blocks in the broken dishes pattern and used them to piece the back with 2 lengths of light blue chambray fabric. I set in the pieced row just a little left of center. I believe this is the first time I experimented with a pieced backing, but I have been doing them ever since. I should really figure out something for the binding. This quilt has been many places, as I hand quilt it when we go on car trips. For right now the backing has been turned to the front and safety pinned in place.

This next quilt is from a Moda pattern by Fig Tree. It was called Summer Stars. I decided to make it up using Christmas colors.

I used up some of the leftovers from the front and many Christmas prints that I didn't really want in my stash anymore. It was perfect for that purpose. The main reason I did the backing this way was that this was the first large quilt I ever machine quilted! I did it in 4 separate sections and joined them together by adding each quilted panel to the next and handstitching the backing seam together.

My most recent quilt is a large wall hanging and I blogged about it at the end of summer. It was the Moda postcard quilt that was done a block at a time at Moda U. I am nearly done sewing the binding to the back.
When I made the pieced backing I worked on the center panel first and I added the portion under the outer borders last. That way I could do the machine quilting in the center panel with out dealing with the extra fabric from the wider borders. I added on the borders and the rest of the pieced backing by machine on the front and by hand on the back. This quilt has both machine quilted and hand quilted.