Last week, I shared the fluffy saga of a big roll of wool batting entering, rather unceremoniously into its special place in my storage room.
At the end of the post, I showed you this quilt top that is ready for quilting. I'm here to tell you that the next steps are underway. . . ..
I prefer to pin-baste my quilts. That means I clear away a big patch of basement floor (I have a finished work room in my basement with hard-as-rock pergo flooring), tape the backing to the floor, right side down, with painters tape. Then layer on the batting (the aforementioned wool stuff) and the quilt top.
Smoothing out any lumps and bumps before a new layer is added.
The I park my fluffy brains (otherwise known as my posterior) in the middle of the quilt, and start pin basting, from one end to the other.
Some folks say you have to start basting in the middle and work out. I'm here to tell ya, I don't do that. I start at one end of the quilt and keep going until the whole thing is pinned.
I place the pins pretty close together, about as far apart as cookie dough on a cookie sheet (m-m-m cookies!).
I use this handy little tool (or an old spoon) to save my finger tips. And I use 1-1/4" curved safety pins to get the deed done.
Why pins and not spray baste?
It's a fair question . . . 1) I prefer pins over spray baste because it leaves a visual record of where I've quilted and where I still need to quilt. As I quilt, I pull out the pins as I go, so if there's a pin, I haven't quilted there yet. 2) I pre-wash most of my fabrics, and every time you wash, the quilt looses color. So I tend not to wash the completed quilt until I have to. Using spray baste implies that I need to wash the quilt sooner rather than later to get the gunk out.
There are a couple other reasons, like the messy overspray, fumes, and my opinion that the pins hold the layers better as I do a lot of crunching and squishing as I quilt, pins are re-usable so I don't have to keep buying more.
With the quilt layers basted, I like to roll the edges of the backing onto and over the quilt and batting edges around the perimeter of the quilt. This sometimes (not always) helps to avoid having those corners folded into the quilting area by accident (enter Mr. Seam Picker to reverse sew that quadruple-layered quilting)
Plus it keeps the quilt edge crisper and makes the quilt easier to handle.
Usually one or two folds takes that extra backing over the quilt edge, then pin with a few more safety pins.
I should add that I quilt my own quilts on my domestic machine (BERNINA 750QE). Prep would be different if you were taking the project to a long arm process.
Then it's time to 'reclaim' the pins.
I almost always start with some straight line stitching using the walking foot. In this case I'm following the diagonal design path to create lines of quilting that are blue and green, and I'm using blue and green thread to match (sorta, close enough) each color area.
In this case I'm also adding a line of stitching 1/4" away from the diagonal ditch quilting.
That's as far as I got this week.
I think it's a little easier to see what's going on with the quilting when you look at it from the back.
I'm using a plain pale blue backing fabric. Now, if you're not confident about your stitching, then I suggest using a fussy-printy something for the backing - it'll hide any quilting 'issues' better.
Next, I can either add some free-motion fill in the blue spaces, or switch to green thread and repeat the ditch and 1/4" quilting process for the green spaces.
The puckers you see here between the lines are the pins. Those will go away as the pins are removed and the quilting advances.
The straight line stuff seems to take a long time - I like to be careful to stay on the down-side of the seam, but then things really pick up with the free motion stuff. Or at least I hope so. . . We'll see!
If you have no idea what I mean by that down-side stuff, I talk about it on page 77 of When Bad Things Happen to Good Quilters. I can direct you here if you need a copy! *wink!*
Happy Stitching!
Joan
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