Hello, I'm working on my first quilt and am considering using minky or fleece as a backing for a throw I'm making for a friend of mine. I'm debating if I will do the batting with a cotton backing or possibly just using a fleece or minky. What's your experience? Is it harder to quilt using fleece? I'm just about done with my quilt top and am at a crossroads on what to do next. Any advice would be great! Thanks!

I have done a couple of fleece backed flannel quilts for my youngest kids. I never used the minky, but love the way it snuggles. Go for it! I would say that if you are using minky, don't use a batt. And you might want to make it a self bound quilt. I have never done that either. Aren't I a big help? LOL! It's just that I have heard minky really fuzzes all over. And I was thinking you might want to contain that. Anyone else want to jump in here and save the day since I am no help?

I am currently hand quilting a machine pieced top and using a heavy fleece as backing (no batting needed).

Have not gotten very far on it (have done one of the 11" + sashing squares), but am very pleased with the way it is coming out. I'm more or less stitching in the ditch, so the quilting only shows on the fleece side, but re-creates the pattern of the front.

The only thing I would caution you about is that some fleece is more stretchy than others, so be careful when choosing your fleece for the backing.

I"ve done a coupole of kids quilts with minky backing but didn't do any fancy quilting on them. In stead, I have a stitch on my machine that produces a small circle...I used that stitch in place of hand-tying and it worked great. I did try to stitch around one of the designs on the front but was not happy with the look on the minky side so gave that up.

i've use fleece twice to back quilts.

on the first quilt i didn't add any batting. it turned out fine, but was a bit too "transparent" for my liking. i also had a few issues with stretching and not all my squares were still square by the time it was done. it still looked good enough, though, that i was comfortable giving it as a gift. my friend cried she was so happy. :-)

on the second, i added the lightest weight cotton batting i could find. the cotton fabrics in the top clung naturally to the cotton batting. because they are both "fuzzy" the batting and fleece also clung to each other. i only did the littlest bit of basting, but the whole thing turned out very well. no stretching problems, no "see through", either.

the next time i back with fleece, i'm going to try using flannel in place of batting. i think it will work the same as batting does.

I just finished a large quilt for a customer that had Cuddle fabric on the back. It is kind of like Minky. It quilted up very nicely, she wanted batting inside so used Warm & Natural Cotton. Just had to be careful not to stretch the backing to much on frame. It came out much Heavier than a normal quilt. Something else to think about.

I made a jean quilt and used the Cuddle fabric on the back with warm and natural cotton batting inside. I only SITD so that was pretty easy. I just made sure and pinned a ton to be able to quilt it using my regular sewing machine.

Hope this helps. I do think this jean quilt with the Cuddle fabric on the back is my all time favorite.

Has anyone bar tacked a quilt instead of quilting. Tell us about it.

I have used the automatic buttonhole on my machine to "tie" a quilt. Just set it for a very small buttonhole. The good part is that it backtacs at both ends. The bad is you have a lot of strings to cut. It does work.

I just started working with minkee a few months ago.
Minkee makes a great backing I have done some with cotton batting and some without.
the ones with batting are much heavier, but very nice!
Use a walking foot when working with the minkee and a large eye needle also increase your stitch length.
I found several very good videos on youtube that helped me alot
here are a few pics