The Four Backs

i had such a clever title planned for this post--"the four tops" but the photos of the tops were blurry and two of them are already basted, so here's a pix of the four backs instead.

i gotta say, if i was rich, i would buy those 108" backing fabrics and send out all my quilts to be quilted--i hate this part of the process--so tedious. but alas, i'm not, rich that is, so i pieced together all 4 of the backs and am in the midst of basting them. two of them are a nice size (70" wide) but the other 2 are monsters over 90" wide--i'm not even sure if they'll fit in my living room floor to baste!

i do think though--there's a lot of value in piecing the backs--that i'm almost glad i'm forced to do it. the backs are so much more interesting when you piece them together and you get to use up miscellaneous bits of fabrics that are nice, but not good enough to actually use for the top. i have had the odd experience of someone preferring the back of my quilt to the front--not sure how to take that!

the top backing (the yellow & white one) is made of fabrics that over 10 years old--they are marimekko, which i bought from crate & barrel. C&B had an outlet store where they had a barrel full of fabric scraps and sold it for like $1.oo/lb. one of the first quilts i ever made was with scraps from that barrel (i have a non-digital picture of it somewhere--not very exciting though). these scraps are ones that i've carried around (3 moves since then) and in fact, last year, i gave them to my mom. she however, is about to move, so had a box of scraps to give to my sister, who was going to take them to her daughter's school for crafts. so i rescued them and am finally using them!

so yes, i guess it's good to be forced to do the boring parts of quilting :-)