It usually happens the moment you start stitching the three layers together. You are sewing along happily, the top looks lovely, and then you turn the quilt over and find the backing has gathered into little pleats and wrinkles. It is one of the most disheartening moments in quilting, and the cause is often not your tension at all, but the order in which you sew your quilting lines.
Think about what your machine is doing on every pass. The feed dogs underneath grip the lower layers and move them along at a slightly different rate from the upper layers gliding beneath the foot. That difference is minute on any single line, but it gathers. When you quilt line after line all travelling the same way, from one edge straight across to the opposite edge, you send that accumulated difference to the same end of the quilt every time. It arrives there with nowhere left to go, and it shows itself as fullness, or as those wrinkles pressed into the backing.
There is a gentler way to work, and it asks nothing of you but a change of habit. Once your quilt is basted, place a large pin right at its centre. Picture the whole quilt divided into four quadrants around that pin. Now begin each quilting line at the centre pin and sew outward to the edge of that one quadrant, then lift and return to the centre for the next line. Work your way through a single quadrant completely, then come back to the middle and begin the next. The same little drift still happens, because the feed dogs behave exactly as they always do, but now it travels outward in four separate directions instead of piling up at one end.
The loveliest part is that none of this asks anything special of you. You need no longarm, no extension table and no specialist tools. It works beautifully on an ordinary domestic machine, using only the pin you already have to hand and a little patience as you turn the quilt between quadrants.
Do you sew your quilting lines from edge to edge, or do you work outward from the centre? I would love to hear how your backings turn out in the comments.
