Thank you for posting the pictures! My quilts have never been that neat and tidy on the reverse side. I do try to trim my threads because I can't stand them, however my pressing leaves a lot to be desired. I get it all confused, upside down and backward. If I have to nest corners heaven only knows where my seam will end up!

I do appreciate you ladies taking the time to post the pictures.

This is a great thread! Thanks for taking the time to post the pictures ... that is very kind of you.

When I've done hand work like embroidery or cross stitch, I've always believed my back should look as good as my front. Such as: no loose/hanging threads or clumps of threads. Stitches in a pretty order (when I cross stitch I want all my back stitches, as much as possible, going up and down).

When I've made quilt tops in the past I only ever tied them. And I would think -those puckers will be hidden in my tying....-

Now.... I have an amazing machine, sisters with so much quilting skill that I'd like to emulate, this quilt board with so much experience, patience and willingness to share. I also have the desire now, as I have more time to "play and create" to learn new skills such as free motion quilting, or maybe I'd like to send a top to be quilted on a longarm.

Thank you for this post. I apologize for taking so long to simply say you ladies have taught me it's ok to slow down and be more careful AND caring about my work.

What a great thread! You know, I take pictures of my projects at every turn. You could practically stack them up and make a flip movie of them. But I never, ever thought of taking pictures of the backside before sandwiching! And now that I've seen others' backsides (sorry, I couldn't resist that one) it is really a helpful thing to do. Just like taking a picture of the front to find things you don't see with the naked eye, the same concept works on the back of the front...

I always want quilts that come to me for quilting to look as good on the back as they do on the front.
I do charge by the hour to trim them up if they are not trimmed. So I tell my ladies this and they have made such improvments that I no longer get quilts that need trimming on the back.

I'm new to the forum but... one of the prettiest quilts to me is white on white. One look says it all. What good is knowledge if it isn't shared. Thank You for your knowledge. I haven't quilted for quite a while but on the recent death of my mother and inheirting her quilting frames, I have a new zeal to quilt. She so loved to quilt. She taught so many the craft.

What a great idea of looking at the backs of the quilts!! I usually haven't worried about how the back looks because no one sees them. NOW I'll pay more attention to the backs too. The backs we've seen here are lovely. That inspires me to want my backs to look better. I'm just imaging someone being able to see inside my quilts and say 'OH MY!!! she didn't make it look very good'.
Janis

What an awesome thread! I never thought of doing this either, Thank you !!! I really love those patterns that give you the pressing directions, it can be very confusing at times. I design a lot of mine on EQ7 and am mostly self taught, so they don't always work out like planned, lol.

When you say trimming-do you mean the hanging threads or is there more trimming involved? I only ask because I think I'm a quilters nightmare. I sew with a charity sewing group and when I show up with tops for quilting I get the eye roll. I get comments like "I had problems with this quilt, my thread kept breaking" Or "my needle broke a couple times" But they aren't giving me specifics on how to make my top so the thread won't keep breaking while they quilt. I think they are trying to spare my feelings.

Things I've been told that I do wrong and I've tried to do better:

1) Always press my seams as I sew. I used to be pretty bad about this, I'd press when my block was finished. Now at least I'm getting better about finger pressing at least between seams.

2) don't have so many over lapping seams-this was more when I was using the smallest crumbs for my blocks.

3) square up the top

So now, I'll add trim my strings on the back as well as the front.

What else?

Really I want to learn! Please give as much advice as you can, even little things that might seem like nit-picking. I want the info. Because I really don't want to quilt my own. I want it as painfree as possible. So I won't be the one everyone dreads to see coming in with an arm load of tops.

I like the backs to look (as far as possible) as nice as the fronts. This is the back of a serged snowball quilt.

I took the picture for a tutorial and the orange marks are there to demonstrate pressing each seam toward the darkest fabric. This back was the nicest I've ever made.

Serging is not an option for many patterns - it adds too much bulk to the seams. But for this snowball quilt, serging works well and, since it's for a toddler, I think it will wear well.