Making Your Sandwich

Time...

A quilt for a crib, or baby quilt can easily take 40 hours of your time. The bigger the quilt, the more time it takes to make. I have spent 120 hours on a single quilt. That's not continuous time, that's a couple hours a night, after work and all day on the weekends. That's a month or months on a single quilt. 

Quilt in a day? Not likely. Maybe you can finish a simple quilt top in 24 hours of work. That's definitely do-able. Then you add in building the sandwich, top-stitching or quilting and binding, well, your back up to a lot of time.

Making the sandwich and preparing the quilt for quilting doesn't take a lot of time, it does take a lot of patience and pins!

Building Your Sandwich

It starts with your backing fabric. This can be a piece of cotton fabric, it can be flannel, it can be fleece, or a new sheet. It can be one solid piece, or a multi-pieced design. It's important that it's bigger than your quilt top by a couple of inches. It should be ironed, without fold lines and wrinkles.

For this quilt, I used dark blue fabric on either side of the figured fabric.

Lie this fabric on a flat surface, and smooth it until it lies completely flat. Layer on your batting fabric. This can be big, fluffy, comforter-like thick batting, flatter cotton or synthetic batting or for warm climates, it can even be a sheet. I like to have my batting just a bit bigger than my quilt top. If your backing is a fleece product, you probably won't have a batting fabric too, as the fleece is used for both products. Lay your batting flat on your backing fabric, and smooth it until it lies flat.

Fleece backed quilt

King-sized cotton batting

To the left is the King-sized quilt I made, I had to put two pieces of batting (cotton, low loft) together to make a piece big enough for this quilt. I used my bed, with a hard surface on the mattress to build my sandwich. 

On the right is an example of fleece being used as the backing fabric and the batting. It makes a very soft sided arty blanket, and is very easy to work with. You must still follow all the steps, building, turning, smoothing, turning and smoothing again when using just the top and backing. 

Next comes the quilt top you have created. It, too, needs to be wrinkle free, with no fold lines. If it's been ironed all the way through the process, it should be ready to lay flat upon the batting and backing. 

Starting in the center, begin pinning the three pieces together, putting a pin in every 6 inches or so. You will wan to use safety pins, so that you don't prick your fingers in the next task. 

Once you have pinned the entire quilt top, batting and backing together, you will want to very carefully flip the quilt over. You will probably notice places that the backing is not laying completely flat. Beginning in the center, you will start smoothing to the outside, moving pins (yep, those pins are on the other side, you will have to reach under, move and repin from underneath) as you need to, to get the back completely smooth. You will want to pay attention to the batting as well, being sure it's still laying flat. 

Back with bubbles and folds, ironing didn't take all the lines out.

After smoothing the quilt, the back looks much nicer.

These are the same backing, I know the colors look different, but they aren't. This is what this quilt back looked like when I flipped it and started smoothing, and when I was nearly finished smoothing the back out. This flipping really makes a big difference to how your quilt looks when it's finished.


When the back is completely smooth, once again, you carefully flip the quilt over so that your quilt top is up. Beginning in the center, make sure that the movement of pins didn't make bubbles in your quilt top. Adjust pins to be sure that the top is laying flat against the batting/backing. 

When it is completely smooth, you will want to add more pins, to keep everything in place as you are sewing. Adding another pin between each set of pins you have already placed wont be too many pins.

When your last pin is set, you are ready to take this sandwich to your sewing machine, and begin top-stitching, or quilting these pieces together! You will begin in the center, and will be mindful of the layers, keeping everything smooth as you quilt your quilt.

Quilting