The backing...flour sacks, rough version, not pretty. Totally utility....making do. I was very moved by this top I had bought. I sat and thought about it as I finished quilting whatever came before it. About the woman, about what her circumstances might have been. I firmly believe that we, as quilters, step forward each generation on the footprints of what came before us. Maybe I believe you can't really know where you are going, or why, if you don't know where you've come from. And so I chose to use these very coarse flour sacks and a wool batt for this quilt top. The sacks were sold in some local store for .99 each. They are fairly good sized, I think it took 4 of them and some "bits" to make the backing. The sack says "Pillsbury" Southern King Patent XXXX. Higher up you can see what is probably Arabic.And in very small print at the top, in faded blue, it says "For Export", and then some kind of a customs type stamp. But what the bags say isn't of that much importance. I felt they were in keeping with the "flavor" of this particular top. It's soooooo a utility quilt, such a "make do", I wanted nothing to distract from the top itself. In hind sight, once it was quilted and bound, I realized that this top probably NEVER would have been hand quilted. Maybe, but probably not. And that's ok too, as I stepped from the footprint of the maker into my footprint, as the quilter., adding my bit to it's completion.