Originally Posted by Iceblossom

I've been doing more and more "noticeably" pieced backs over the years. Back in the day, extra wide fabric wasn't easily found. I seem to be unable to design a top that easily fits on anything but an extra wide back...

One solution is to offset the seams/don't make it follow the top. You can do some really cool stuff that takes a lot of time and patience to match seams, in which case I'd probably recommend a more quilt as you go approach.

You also don't want seams right down the middle or in regular fold places for a number of reasons. So back in the day, the advice was if you needed two widths of fabrics, you had a full width down the center, and then you split the other in half long wise, and put each side on the center, so 2 seams/3 pieces of fabric.

Here's a couple of my pieced backs of different design/resource reasons.

The first one doesn't look like much, but was a border print and I had to be really exact with the sizing and such to get the print right and the top on the borders right.

The second was my first heavily pieced back. Top is cats from a the McCalls cat quilt block swap.

The next is for my current Bonnie Hunter project, I had 6 yards of fabric in my stash which was enough length but not enough width, so I added the bars of colors (from the back and used on the top) to extend. Bars were deliberately different widths to help avoid landing on seam lines of the top.

Last is one of my favorite back solutions using two very different fabrics. It isn't quite what I wanted, but close enough and I'm happy with it. The basic thing is that everything is offset, so it doesn't have to match anything on the front.