I’m getting towards the end of the piecing phase of this project. There are less than 10 blocks left to stitch, and I’ve made great strides on the sashing too.

So, the need to find a backing fabric has become more urgent.

The “kit” I got for this quilt came with about 5 yards of a dark black/brown with red motifs on it, which are a great color match for the red background fabric, but I’m not convinced there is enough of this backing fabric to work.

So, I’ve been toying with doing some sort of alternating stripes with this fabric and the red background fabric, but again, I’m not sure I have enough of that left either.

Also, with the excessive seam allowance on these tiny blocks, I want to have as few seams on the back as possible. It’s going to be tough to hand quilt as it is, without adding more layers of seam allowance at regular intervals on the back.

Plus, once I laid the fabric out next to the partially finished quilt top for the above photo, the backing just looks so DARK. And I’m not sure how I feel about it.

With all these strikes against the original fabric, I continued to ponder the backing fabric possibilities while I put together this batch of sashing.

For a change, these four blocks were reasonably-sized and could be attached to the sashing fairly quickly and easily. The only tricky part is that I’m now so close to the end that I had to sash Block M4 pretty much as soon as I finished stitching it. I almost forgot to take a photo of the finished block for the blog before sashing it together!

The sashing going together so quickly didn’t leave me much time to ponder my options for backing fabric.

But then a chance eBay search gave me another option.

I’m a fan of Pat Speth’s “nickel quilt” books, where she makes quilts out of 5″ scraps. Her color choices are not always my fave, but I love her complex scrappy designs. I’ve got most of her books, but one continues to elude me (the Nickel Quilts and Borders book).

So, I periodically check eBay and Etsy for a copy. I’ve been buying quilting books, fabrics, patterns, tools, etc. secondhand both in an attempt to be more eco-friendly, and also because a lot of quilt book publishers and other quilt businesses are no longer around, so secondhand is the only way to acquire their cool stuff.

And the eBay search on this particular day turned up a listing for all of the fabric needed to make a Pat Speth pattern. The fabrics in the bundle were mostly leaf prints, so you know that caught my eye!

And in the back right corner of the photo was an olive green fabric with little berries (cherries? something) on it. The description said there were almost nine yards of that fabric alone. And it’s not like I won’t find a use for leaf print fabrics in many other projects.

My faithful readers already know how much I hate buying fabric online, but it was a bargain, even with $25 in shipping costs, and I took a chance.

Here is the green with cherries/berries/something fabric, artfully draped across some of the sashed part of my Dear Jane quilt:

What do you all think? Despite the fact that there’s not really anything orangey-yellow like the berries/cherries/something on the front of the quilt, I think this is a decent match – especially for something that will only be on the back. I may just have accidentally (but serendipitously!) found my backing fabric.