Monday, May 28, 2018

Design Wall Monday: Sizing Up Backing

I have a lot of fabric left over from the front of grandson CJ's big boy bed quilt, plus a yard of a similar print given to me by a friend. I'll use all of these to piece a backing.

The quilt top measures 63" x 87" so I need a pretty big backing. I can lay it out on my design wall. Floor to ceiling is 96" so if  I lay the backing pieces out full height, it will be long enough even after the piecing seams are sewn. The panel up the center is WOF minus selvages. The pieces pinned at the left are WOF folded in half. I'll cut them along the fold and add the cut parts to the right side of the center panel. The resulting full width will be about 78-80", a little wider than I need, but that's okay.

Have I mentioned lately how much I love my design wall?!!! Sorry for the angled photo, the room is too small and crowded to get all of the design wall into one straight shot.

If you look closely you can see lines on the design wall. These are black thread anchored with pins, and I use them as horizontal and vertical guides. In this case, my backing needs to extend at least to the vertical thread line on the right. The lower of the two horizontal lines is the highest I can reach without the stepladder, and the other horizontal is left from some past project. Very helpful! Do you mark your design wall as needed?


Link ups:
Small Quilts and Doll Quilts
Em's Scrapbag
Love Laugh Quilt


2 comments:

  1. Great tip to mark your design wall; I had never considered doing that. Looks like you will have a backing for CJs quilt finished very soon!

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  2. I so wish I had a design wall, but alas, there is no place for one in the completely open family room that is my sewing space. I'd definitely need vertical and horizontal marked lines to help me avoid my usual problem of skewing the backing.

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