Long Arm Quilting: A Week of Too Small Quilt Backings

A few days ago, I talked about a quilt where the backing fabric was too big.  Well, it was just my luck to have a run of quilts where the backing fabrics were too small!

This should be a lesson to me, to always measure measure measure, before I pin pin pin.  It wastes soooo much time to prepare a quilt to be loaded, only to find out the backing is too small for the quilt to be quilted.  You’d think I’d learn my lesson by now, but… nope.

This first backing is too small, because I accidentally used the wrong backing fabric from the owner’s first quilt:

It’s not slightly too small… it is very clearly not big enough and not intended for this project.  My only option was to contact the owner, apologize profusely for my mistake, and ask her how she wanted me to handle it.  There were basically two options as I saw it:

• Replace the backing with a flannel that I happened to have on hand from another quilting job that got canceled.  It’s the right size, but not the same color as the original backing.
• Order a new backing fabric, at my expense.

The owner chose the backing I had on hand, which actually worked out great for me, because I don’t like stocking flannel, and I had 4 yards that didn’t have a home in my studio.

The only reason I even offered this as an option is that I thought it would go well with the quilt – so the key here isn’t just to replace a backing with “whatever” if you mess up, but to find an alternative that gives the customer as close to what they had originally, and to try to make it right.  Of course I will not charge her for the new backing, and I will return the other backing fabric to her as well.

The second backing is too small because I loaded the quilt the wrong way.  Oops!  Before your jaw drops on the floor and you wonder how on earth this could have happened, it’s because I decided to re-orient the quilt and quilt it on the long edge, but then I decided to float the quilt top, and I forgot that I had rotated the backing fabric.  Because the extra amount of fabric on the sides seemed to be correct, I just went ahead and quilted it this way.  Imagine my surprise when I got to the end of the quilt (yup, I didn’t discover this until I was on the last row of quilting) to see this:

Argh!!  That’s the second quilt this week, and again is my fault.  How did I handle this one?

Well, I know the owner has a very “I don’t care” attitude about this quilt – she already told me that she didn’t really like it that much and would just use it as a couch throw.  So in this case, I knew she wouldn’t care how I fixed it, and I didn’t consult her at all (though I did apologize for the mistake.)   Since I knew the quilt back had extra fabric on the sides, I took the quilt off the frame, cut fabric off of each side (because I still needed the quilt to be roughly centered so I could reload it):

And then stitched an extra flap onto the bottom of the quilt back.

After that, I just repinned it to my leaders, and kept going.

If you find yourself in a similar situation, unless you know the owner very well & what their likes/dislikes are, I don’t suggest you hack into their backing without asking first.  It may turn out to not be a big deal in the end anyway, but it’s important to own up to your mistakes and apologize, offer up a solution, and let them choose.  Obviously, you can avoid this mess in the first place by measuring measuring measuring, but even the best of us have an off day, or week in my case. 

This third quilt wasn’t the result of my own mistake, but I could have avoided a lot of heartburn and work if I’d measured first.

First of all, I didn’t measure it because the backing had clearly not been squared or pressed.  It looked like it had just come out of the dryer, got folded haphazardly, and stuck in a bag.  If you’ve washed fabric before, you know what it looks like fresh out of the dryer!  So to be honest, I wasn’t in the mood to even deal with it.  Part of the reason was because this was a king sized backing, and that takes a couple of hours to press & square.  Although I have the space to press & square a backing that big, I don’t like having to do it when I don’t know I have to do it ahead of time.

Some people don’t have the room to handle quilt backs that big, so they really do need the long armer to do it for them.  That’s fine, but if you need this service, please tell your quilter in advance.  Don’t hide your backing at the bottom of the bag & hope they won’t notice.  When we’re ready to quilt, we’re ready to QUILT, and we don’t want to stop, heat up the iron, clear off the cutting table, haul out the squaring rulers, etc. and take 2 hours to do something we could have done the day before if only we had known.  If you let us know in advance, we can plan to do another quilt while we fix your backing, and do it with a smile on our face instead of a knotty frown. 

I have so many quilts to finish right now that I just did not have the time to fix this one myself, so I am very lucky that my friend WenR volunteered to come help me the other day.  She pressed the backing expertly, and then learned my method for squaring large backs.  It was so fabulous to have this done & neatly hung on the hanger, that I just forgot to measure it.

Well, imagine my surprise to load the quilt and find this:

Yup… that’s less than an inch of width between the quilt top and the backing.  No, the quilt doesn’t fit in the other direction (ha, ha.) No, it wasn’t the squaring that impacted this, because the squaring was of the non-selvage edges.

Now, when I get narrow backs, sometimes I can still quilt them by basting muslin strips on each side.  However, in this case, the “extra” on the sides is actually a selvage, and that’s just the worst thing to stitch on.  Plus, the selvage would end up getting quilted in, and that would make the quilt edges very wavy and not nice looking.  In this case, the quilt goes back to the owner, unquilted, and it will be up to them to decide how they want to fix the backing.

Hopefully, now that I’ve seen how much extra work results when I skip steps, I will measure measure measure before I pin pin pin.