Beginner Quilting Session 7: Selecting Batting and Backing Fabric

Once you have your quilt top pieced, it is time to start thinking about backing fabric and batting. Now there are multiple different types of batting and different sizes of batting that you can buy when you go to the craft store. Now, a couple of types that I have here is I have some cotton batting and then I have some polyester batting. You can also get combination of cotton polyester mixes for your batting. And it'll kind of depend on what you want to put, what your personal preference is, for your quilts.

Maybe if you know that somebody is maybe allergic to polyester or something, pick a cotton. You can also get wool or other sort of hypoallergenic versions of some batting that you can pick as well. So sort of your own personal preference as to what type of batting you pick. And then you wanna think about the size of batting. I obviously have very small sizes of batting here in front of me right now, and these would be what's called craft sizes or quilt, or crib quilt sizes, and this would be the smallest sizes of batting that you can buy.

You can also buy batting that's already sized for twin, full, queen and king-size quilts. And then of course you can buy batting right off the bolt. So you can buy any length of batting that you would like. So those are a couple of the things to keep in mind with batting is pick your different type, and then think about what size you're going to need that matches with the quilt size that you have. So once you have your batting, you need to have some backing fabric.

So here I just have, again, some simple cotton, and in this case I had a really small project I was working on, so I actually just unfolded a fat quarter and that's what I'm using right now as my backing fabric. Now, if I'm going to make really a large king-size quilt, I might actually have to piece together, in two big long widths of fabric, my actual backing fabric, 'cause I need to make sure that my backing fabric is larger than my quilt top. In this case, I have just a little, little quilt sample I've made, and so when it comes to my batting and my backing fabric, I need everything to be a little bit bigger than the next. So I have my quilt top, I have my batting, is a little bit bigger than my quilt, and I have my backing fabric, again, a little bit bigger than my batting. And this is really just to help so when I'm actually doing my quilting and things are getting pulled or maybe moved a little bit in one direction, that nothing goes over the edge, that I don't have to worry about maybe there's a part of my quilt that maybe went over the edge of my batting and isn't going to be layered like everything else.

So I wanna make sure that when I'm buying my batting and when I'm putting together my backing fabric that I really have enough in place to be able to cover everything behind my quilt. So if you have a quilt top or a little small quilt sample that you wanna practice along and we're going to quilt it, I would recommend getting a small piece of batting, get your backing fabric ready to go, and then come back here and we're going to layer it and talk about how we're gonna quilt everything together.