This project is using some antique’ blocks given to me by friend Kim S. They are from the 1890’s era so to put them into a quilt it would be necessary to find a fabric that would play along with the blocks. I choose William Morris and Co fabrics from Free Spirit. The Morris and Co fabrics were designed by William Morris in the 1860-80’s. This is the navy background of Strawberry Thief. I purchased a lot of fabric as the quilt will be 104″ x 104″. I decided to use the focus fabric from the front as the backing. This blog post is to show and explain how to join widths of fabrics together in order to make a backing that appears to be continuous.
I washed the fabric and folded it lengthwise and then accordion wise after washing to make it easier to manage. Both edges of the width of fabric ended with the bird center. From middle of design on one edge to the other edge was 39″. Three widths would be wide enough to cover my 104″ wide quilt top. I selected the space between the bird’s tail feathers to be the match point. From that spot, I used a ruler to cut 1/2″ to the right of the desired stitching line. With each cut, just push the fabric up to the top of the cutting board and pile it out of the way. Align the 1/2″ line on the ruler to the desired stitch line and cut 1/2″ to the right.
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