Cracker Scraps Backing

Are you all tired of this quilt yet? I feel like I’ve been working on it forever…between designing it, cutting up fabrics for a bee, getting back blocks from two different bees, sewing the top together, wanting to make it a king size, changing my mind and keeping it a queen size….

What? I’m keeping it a queen size?!

Yep. I couldn’t quite see this one on our king size bed….it just doesn’t seem enough like my husband. Plus all of the white. To know my husband is to know that the white just wouldn’t be that way for too long. 😉 But…it will be PERFECT for the guest room! That’s exactly where you can get away with putting a lighter colored quilt because there isn’t the same kind of daily wear and tear. And I wanted to make a quilt for that room but I thought it was ages down the road.

AND I’m still going to send it off to be quilted by a long arm quilter…Krista in fact! I’m super excited because now I can do the design on it that I want and I don’t have to make it husband friendly. 😉

When you send a quilt to a long arm quilter, they typically need the back just a little bit larger than I would normally make for my own quilting purposes because of how they need to load it into the machine. So I dove into my stash and pulled a bunch of fabrics that coordinated with the front.

I had a strip of blocks already sewn together that I used as the center for the backing. And then I went to town with other fabric strips on either side. I’m a little bit in love with it.

I love that this will basically end up as a two sided quilt if I want. Maybe I’ll have the whiter side on for the spring and summer and the darker for fall and winter. Oh I’m getting excited!

And talk about a stash buster! I love that all of these fabrics finally have a happy home. A lot of them are ones that were languishing in my stash….overlooked for fancier, brighter, chattier fabrics (you know…the ones that speak to me). Or they were fabrics that I thought I would love when I bought them online and then never quite found the right place for them. Each of these fabrics has its own story. But they all have the same ending: They make one fabulous back!

So next time you see it, hopefully it will be complete. I need to pick out a binding still, but that can wait. For now, I gleefully send off a project to Krista and let her do her magic. I feel like I’m playing chutes and ladders and I just got the ladder that takes you from the beginning of the game almost to the end!