On the Road to Spring quilt-along (week four: assembling your quilt sandwich)

I am behind on checking the flickr group and sending out addresses for the Sewing Seeds project.  By the end of today I will be caught up, I promise!

We are over halfway there! 

This is another easy and non-time consuming week.  If you are feeling behind, this is a great week to get caught up. 

First up, make sure you have all the supplies you need:  your quilt top, 3 yards backing fabric, 2 yards 90" wide Warm and Natural batting, quilter's safety pins, masking tape and some floor space.

The first thing you need to do is to lay out your backing fabric on the floor:

Then you will fold it lengthwise (the selvage edge is at the top of the photo) and lay your quilt top underneath the folded piece to make sure that it is smaller (there is no reason that the quilt top should be bigger than the backing piece, but I always like to check prior to cutting):

Now cut along the edge the scissors are pointing to in the above picture.  Your fabric will look like this now:

Cut your selvage edges off so they don't end up showing on your quilt backing:

Turn your right sides together (lining up the edges where you cut the selvages off) and sew the pieces together using a 1/4" seam:

This is what your backing piece should look like:

Iron your seam:

Lay your backing right-side down on the floor:

Start taping the backing fabric to the floor (this helps to avoid puckering when you add the batting and the quilt top):

This is what you should be looking at now:

This is the view from the top of my stairs:

Open up your quilt batting and lay it out even with the right edge and the bottom edge of your quilt backing (the extra should hang over the upper edge and the left edge).  Spend some time making sure your batting is straight and as flat as you can get it:

Now add your quilt top about 2-3 inches from the right edge and the bottom edge:

Here is a closer view:

Trim all the way around your quilt about 2-3 inches from the edge:

This is what you should see at this point:

You need to clip on your safety pins over the top of your quilt:

I usually put mine on about 6 inches apart.  Close up of pinned section:

That's it! 

Now you get to set your lovely quilt-sandwich aside and get ready for next week:  machine-quilting!  Today I am going to try to put together a video to demonstrate how it's done. Crossing my fingers that it works out!  :)

Happy sewing!