About to back my first "real" quilt.. Advice?
My first project was a baby quilt, which was super easy since the fabric was big enough to cover the back. Now I am about to get my sandwich together for my second project, a large lap quilt (had to buy twin sized batting). I just pulled the batting out of the dryer, so it should be shrunk and ready to go. I've been googling for methods of doing this with fabric that isn't sized large enough to cover the back without piecing it together.
What is your preferred method? Also, any thing I should look out for with grain direction?
It seems some people like to just have a seam down the middle (vertical or horizontal) while others like to offset the seam. For the larger quilts I also saw one suggestion to cut three panels, and have a larger panel in the middle with smaller panels on the sides.
One that I particularly liked, and am toying with in my head, is putting a strip of a different fabric between the two halves of the backing fabric(s) to create a stripe. Since this is the back of a lattice quilt with a black background, I was thinking it might even look good to make a kind of offset + with black strips... but that will require a trip to buy more black fabric.
About the only things the methods seem to agree on is that you need a 1/2" seam that is pressed open, and that the selvage should be cut off.