Charity Quilt Back

I finished piecing the back of the charity quilt on Tuesday and got the quilt basted last night. I normally wouldn't do so much piecing, but I didn't have enough yardage for a solid backing and wanted to try to pull some fabric from my stash. The only extra fabric I bought for the project was the blue swirls yardage for the borders on the top (with leftovers for the back) and the multi-squares that I used on the back.


Since I knew I didn't have enough yardage for a solid back, I started sketching out a design, using some of the leftover triangles from the quilt top. I've realized that I use a scant 1/4 inch seam. That's definitely something to keep in mind when I sketch designs out in the future.


I pulled this orange from my stash, which was leftover from a pillow project earlier in the year. The two shades of orange work well with the oranges in the Frolic line. After piecing this together, it looked like a cute little table runner. I don't use them at my house, but it gave me even more ideas for Christmas presents (like I need more ideas...I already have too many ideas for projects than time to get them made before Christmas).


Here's my little helper trying to hold up part of the backing. (He's starting all-day preschool on Monday and I'm going to be making him a cute little lunch sack and matching reusable sandwich/snack bags - more on that to come.)

The brown is a Kona cotton (I can't remember the exact color) that I bought months ago to go with the jellyroll sampler quilt. Since I didn't end up making the full 12 blocks in the quilt-along, I had plenty of brown fabric to spare. It matched the Frolic line pretty well, but also reminded me of a pair of polyester pants my grandma used to wear.

There's a thin strip between the bottom blue and brown strips. It was a leftover jellyroll strip that I didn't use for the top so I cut it in half lengthwise to add a little separation between the blue and brown.


Do you remember my label debate? After much thought, I decided to go with handwritten labels for a couple reasons. One, it's easier to personalize the quilt because I can write the name of the quilt and who the quilt is for. And two, I think it will be neat to preserve a bit of me in my handwriting. As an added bonus, it will be good to practice my hand-drafting skills that I haven't really used since my interior design college days.


I hope to start the quilting tonight. If I plan this right, I'll be able to finish up the quilt by the first of next week and hand it off to my brother-in-law for the auction.

Linking up:

Labeling Quilts

Sorry you haven't heard much from me in the past week, guys. My back went out over the weekend and I haven't done much sewing. I had back surgery last summer to remove a piece of my L4-L5 disk that had herniated. Although the surgery got rid of the pain I was in at the time, my back still goes out every now and then.

Tonight I'm heading to my in-laws' house to take advantage of their hardwood floors to do some basting. I haven't made labels for my quilts before, but I really want to. My question though is at what point do you attach the label? Do you wait until the quilt is quilted (but before adding the binding)? Do you wait until it is 100% done? Do you add the label before basting? I thought I'd add it to the backing before I baste the quilt tonight so I can treat it like appliqué and use one of my machine's appliqué stitches. But will the label get messed up when I quilt it? I'm not that great at hand-sewing so I didn't totally want to wait and do it after I've done the quilting, but maybe that's the better way to go.

How do you apply your labels?