another question on Dresden plate quilt..
 

Sorry if I am driving you nuts with my another questions on the Dresden quilt I am making.

Ok I started making the plates for this quilt and have about 8 done so far. I had a question about the size of the background fabric in my last post, about what size it should be.

I got a idea, it may not work but thought I would run it by all of you.How would it be if you took a piece of backing fabric that is like 107 inches wide by how long you want your quilt to be and just sewed the plates to that.you could just arrange the plates how they would look good and just sew then on, with no seams.. Would that work? Do you think maybe it won't lay flat? This is just a thought that came to me as i was sewing the plates together. Sometimes I get crazy ideas LOL

This was just a thought and don't know if it would work or not.. Thanks again Ladies

The only difficulty that I see is then when you applique, the background shrinks a little bit so you may not have a totally flat top. Does that makes sense??

And are you going to machine applique. The smaller blocks may be easier to handle and control.

Give it a try. :) if you find it difficult you could lay out your plates in the layout you like, pin them into place then cut your background into manageable sized sections. I think it's a great way to do it. Personally I would hand stitch the plates onto the background. But machine could work too.

I think you just need to be careful ( if itmatters to you ) to get them aligned in straight rows.

I think you could draw very light pencil lines on the background to help with that.

HuMMM I may give this a try, I was thinking of putting the plate in off centered rows not all straight..Oh I don't know what I am doing, guess I'll wait till I get all the plates done and go from there. Thanks Everyone....

Have you done machine applique before? Because, if you haven't, you may run into some problems with this idea. This is because it is *very* easy when appliqueing large shapes onto a background fabric to end up with distorted background fabric. When sewing in a circle, a lot of the sewing is on the bias of the background fabric and the bias is notorious for stretching. When I applique on blocks I make sure that the background fabric is *very heavily starched* so that it is much less likely to stretch and distort as I sew. I also like to starch the applique so that it also is stabilized.

I would strongly recommend that you applique a practice plate to a background square to make sure you understand how the backing fabric will be affected. If you do not starch heavily, you will almost certainly finish only to find unacceptable distortion in the background fabric when you are done. This is the reason why I would advocate against the idea of trying to applique all of the plates to a single large piece of fabric. Even if you starch the large piece heavily, it will lose some of its stability as you manipulate the fabric underneath the arm of your machine. If you do try this, I would recommend doing several additional layers of spray starch on the next area of applique before sewing. In other words, heavily starch the background fabric, then before each plate add some layers of spray starch to the background area for that individual plate.

I also think you would find it tiring manipulating all that fabric underneath the arm of your machine as you sew around each plate, even if you can stabilize the background sufficiently. So much excess fabric will also make it more difficult to applique accurately.

These are the major reasons why the standard method is to applique onto individual blocks, then sew the blocks together. While it's possible to do it on one big piece of background fabric, most people who do machine applique would shy away from that. If you are not experienced with machine applique, you will probably run into a lot of problems you didn't expect.

What Prism said, especially this:

There is definitely a reason why appliqueing the plates onto blocks, then assembling the blocks together is the standard design - it's MUCH easier to simply sew straight rows of blocks than to wrestle with all that fabric.

I love this idea. Arrange it how you like it the most. But you may then decide you want to cut the background down into more manageable chunks. Please post a picture. It sounds like a fun idea.