I like to find backing fabrics for my projects that match the theme of the quilt. That doesn’t always work out but I was lucky and found some cute penguin fabric for the back of my Penguin Promenade sample quilt. I ordered it online and didn’t even notice it was flannel. I usually go for flat cotton but didn’t mind a flannel backing. What I did mind though was the leftovers. I do not have a flannel scraps collection, and I definitely didn’t want to start one. So I cut all the remaining fabric into the largest possible squares and contacted the We Care committee of my local guild. The guild has a huge stash of fabric donations for quilts, and I was sure there would be some flannel pieces that would work with my little penguins. The ladies promptly delivered flannel fabrics for me to use, and Gail even donated a super cute penguin flannel from her own stash for the backing.

I came up with some kind of layout, very simple, really, probably too simple, because I ended up sewing the rows together in the wrong order and spent some time taking it all apart again. When the top was finished I decided to just use a pantograph for quilting and chose “White Out”, a snowflake pattern that I have in my collection. And for the first time ever I ran out of backing fabric on my longarm frame. I could have kicked myself… remember that old saying about measuring twice before cutting? Well, the same goes for measuring before loading a quilt, and while I would never, ever not measure a customer’s quilt, I *thought* I knew how large my quilt top was.

Turns out I was mistaken. Because I cut different sizes of squares from the penguin flannel (I am going to make at least one more donation quilt from the leftovers, possibly even two) and had come up with different layouts, apparently I remembered the wrong finished size. Anyway, to make a long story short, there are tutorials out there on how to join another piece of backing fabric with the one on the frame without ever taking the quilt off of the frame. Let me tell you, that’s not as easy as they make it look in the video tutorials. I managed to do it with a satisfying result for a donation quilt but I will make sure that I properly measure and lay out every quilt from now on because I sure don’t ever want to have to do this again! But it is finished now, even the label is stitched on, and I will drop it off to be donated soon and get started on the next one.