Enlarge Your Quilt Backing with String Quilting
Do you ever have a piece of fabric you’d love to use for a quilt backing, but it isn’t quite big enough to cover the whole area of the quilt? That’s the problem I ran into with this little baby quilt (38″ x 38″). I had a large scrap piece of flannel that would be perfect as a backing, EXCEPT that it was a little too small.
Here’s one easy way to solve this problem — insert a string-quilted strip that makes the backing big enough to fit the quilt.
Here’s how to make a string-quilted section like the one shown in the photo above:
- Cut a strip of lightweight fabric to use as the foundation fabric for your scrap strips. The foundation strip for this quilt was a piece of muslin 8″ wide and 40″ long. You don’t have to use a foundation, but I find it makes it easy to keep the strips lying flat and to help me choose the right size strips.
- Sew scrap fabric strips to the foundation fabric, starting in the middle and working out to both ends. I tried to choose scraps that harmonized with the colors of the quilt top. See our post on string quilting for step-by-step instructions.
- Fold the backing fabric at the point where you want to add the string section and press to mark the fold. The fold doesn’t have to be in the center — it can be wherever you’d like to place the string section.
- With the backing fabric still folded, use a ruler and rotary cutter to cut the fabric in half just a hair away from the pressed line. Keep your cut as close to the fold as possible.
- Sew the string strip between the two pieces of backing, using a quarter-inch seam.
After that, it’s just a matter of basting, quilting, and binding. Here’s a view of the finished quilt from the front: