Week Two, Quilt Two - BackArt!

Jake's Trucks Quilt

 My little grandson, Jake, loves to play with trucks, backhoes, excavators, etc. There were some dump trucks in their neighborhood and he was fascinated with what they were doing. When I saw this fabric in Florida, I could not resist and made this easy quilt for him. The pattern is from Villa Rosa Designs and on a simple postcard, Sundance.

 He's coming to see me soon and I hope he'll have fun with it! 

 I decided to 'use up' some fabrics for the back, also known as Backart. One of my first introductions to Backart was a book by Danita Rafalovich and Kathryn Pellman, Backart on the Flip Side, published in 1991. It seemed to be a fairly new concept then.

My method of doing this is simply looking at the quilt top and beginning to pull fabrics from my stash with those colors in mind. I probably pulled at least 25 from my closet that MIGHT possibly work, maybe more. As I begin making the back, I look at the size of my pieces, determine a plan and begin pressing the fabrics and cutting into straight pieces.

First I wanted to use all the leftovers from the kit for the top, piecing some of those together. Next I decided this might work best in strips, or rows, because I had so many different size fabrics. I determined how large I needed the backing to be, tried to find a common denominator with the size pieces I had cut to join them to a row, and then what was "pleasing" to the eye, next. 

This is working improvisationally to me, and quite fun! No rules but the ones I make as I go along. If a fabric doesn't make it into this back, it's okay, back to the shelf it goes. If I need to cut half an inch off a strip to make it fit another, that's ok. I just do it. the horizontal rows may not be exact to begin with but as I go, I even them up or add "coping" strips to make them close to the same. I may even piece some simple blocks to make use of some fabrics.

Because of longarm quilting, I need the backing to be 6" - 8" larger than the quilt top.

Here is a larger picture of the whole back as it lays over my longarm machine. I am going to try not to worry so much about all my photos. It often keeps me from blogging on my other blog, Quilting by Judith, waiting to get that really good photo or the whole quilt at a time. I'm trying to 'let that go' yet still have reasonably good pictures so I can reach my goal.