m. mouse here - i just love soft and cuddly fabrics - whether it is flannel (like i'm lying on here) or fleece.
when i'm curled up on a fleece blanket, i remember seeing quilting daughter stephanie curled up with her fleece blanket (you can see it below).
the thing is not only are they soft, but when you make one, you don't even need to put batting in it.
A quilt with no batting? Is it possible?
Okay, so you can already think of quilts that traditionally don’t have three layers – like a yo-yo quilt, for example. But other than that, we generally think of our quilts as three layers. Leaving out the batting would be like having a peanut butter sandwich without any peanut butter, right?
Maybe it is time to try something a little different. Here’s a great way to make a two layer quilt and still get to actually “quilt” it. Make your quilt top as usual, but omit the batting layer and use polar fleece for the backing.
Polar fleece is warm enough to give your quilt the traditional comfort of a quilt. As a matter of fact, having polar fleece on the back side of your quilt makes it super cuddly and perfect for wrapping up in on a cold day or night.
The fabric is available in a wide range of solid colors and prints these days. You should surely be able to find something that coordinates nicely with almost any quilt top.
To use polar fleece as a quilt backing, simply proceed as usual…minus the batting. You will still need to baste your two layers together. You may machine quilt or hand quilt.
The quilt will bind the same way as a traditional one. The only difference will come if you use the self binding method where you pull the back over to the front for binding. Naturally if you do this, your polar fleece will become part of the quilt top. That’s perfectly fine to do, but if you want the fleece to stay on the back side, you will need to bind the quilt with another method.
The fleece really shouldn’t change much about your quilting process. Since the fleece is on the back, it should still maneuver through your quilting or sewing machine as usual. If you had to piece together panels of fleece for your backing, you will probably have a little extra bulk in your seam allowances.
Here’s a tip to keep in mind – do not press your polar fleece seam allowances with an iron. It is a synthetic fabric and will melt. Simply finger press the seams instead. We generally promote pressing toward the darker fabric in quilt tops, but since the polar fleece is all one color in the back, just press the seams open.
The good thing about polar fleece is that it comes in widths much wider than most standard quilting fabrics. While you can expect to find cotton quilting fabrics in widths of about 45 inches, polar fleece has a standard width of about 60 inches.
The downfall to quilting with polar fleece is that the fabric tends to be rather stretchy. If you are accustomed to quilting with cottons only, this might come as a special challenge. If machine quilting, be sure to move your quilt from the top – don’t pull on the fleece bottom as you are sewing. Using a ballpoint needle will help, too.
If you are hand quilting and have your project in a lap frame, be especially mindful of the backing’s stretch possibility. While you want the frame to keep the fabric taut, you do not want to stretch the back. If you have your quilt in a large floor frame, stretching shouldn’t be an issue.
It’s always fun to shake things up a little in our quilt projects. Giving polar fleece a chance to be a quilt backing is a great way to try something different. The result you get will be a quilt that gets used for a lot of cuddle time.
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| This fleece baby quilt was made using a panel with the bears. The panel was placed on top of the fleece, I stitched around each of the bear sections with straight stitching, and then the fleece was folded around to the front to finish the quilt. |
Happy Quilting!
Penny Halgren
Master Quilter
