Pieced Quilt Back

I ran into a bit of a problem the other day while working on a queen size quilt. I finished my top:

I was so excited to finally be finishing this up when I realized I did not have enough fabric for the back. Ugh! I couldn't believe it.  I even had three different fabrics in mind that I could use as the back. I had intended on lining up two long panels, matching the prints and sewing them together to make one large back piece. But non of them were large enough. And it was a lot of fabric as in over 6 yards of each print! I was losing so much fabric lining up the patterns that my queen quilt was going to turn into a twin size, not good! So I had three options

      1. Go buy more fabric. Specifically a wide quilting fabric which runs about $15/yard at Joann Fabrics and I needed 3yards.

      2. Go buy a 100% cotton sheet. This is what my Granny used for her large quilt backs, pretty smart in my opinion if only I had done this first.

      3. Get creative and make do with what I had on hand.

Number 3 please! So I got all of my left over strips and pieces from where I cut my flags and just stitched them together one on top of the other until I had a piece the length of my quilt top.  They were all different widths so I just trimmed the excess down to the width of the shortest piece, about 23inches. I also trimming the other edge to make sure it was even.

Then I just stitched my two long pieces to either side of my pieced strip and viola! One queen size quilt back.

Normally I do use one big piece of fabric just because that was how my Granny quilted and I learned from watching her. However, I think she would approve; especially since I made do with what I had on hand. I also used this method in the past on a baby quilt. I think it actually made it cuter and could even be reversible.

Hope this inspires you to get creative with your quilt backs! Just because its the back doesn't mean it can't be as pretty as the front. I will be back with pictures of the quilt once I am finished.