Originally Posted by katier825
Prism99 ~ when you starch the back stiff like that, how do you handle it when quilting to get the extra out of your way? Do you roll it? Isn't that akward to handle?
I loosely accordion pleat; found it works much better for me than rolling. The starched backing fabric doesn't make the quilt any more difficult to manipulate.
Once fabric is starched the way I described and cut into blocks, the blocks have that level of stiffness I described (enough even to not tunnel when doing satin stitching). However, on backing fabrics the stiffness is not that apparent -- maybe because the piece is so much bigger? I can hold a square of starched fabric and it looks like a piece of paper (doesn't droop), but a starched backing piece won't do that. Plus, I think the starch basically gets broken down as the fabric is handled.
For a really large quilt (I make mostly smaller quilts) a solution of 1:2 Sta-Flo:water might be better than 1:1 for the backing. It would still have enough stiffness to prevent puckers and tucks on the back. I'm just an "over-kill" kind of person, I guess. I found that I really like max stiffness in the fabric as long as it washes out later. The stiffness seems to prevent a lot of errors that used to dismay me (especially finding tucks in the underside of the quilt after machine quilting!).