Saturday, February 27, 2010

Basting....Boring Basting!

I will admit it - I do not enjoy basting a quilt to ready it for quilting. I have used pins, one of those plastic tagger gizmos and basting with thread over the years and not found any that was not BORING! It is time consuming too but thank goodness for the TV in the room where I baste. I watched the last Harry Potter movie this afternoon which help pass the time some.

In the photo above I have everything ready to start basting. I use the method demonstrated by Sharon Schamber in one of her free videos on this web page. Sharon's video is full of details and you can really see what she is doing. Of all the different ways I have tired basting, I find this the easiest for me. The method uses two boards, one you roll the backing onto and the other you roll the quilt top. Only a small portion of the quilt sandwich is basted at a time as you can see on the photo below. I have this section about 2/3 bastedd

The basting stitch looks like the padding stitch used in tailoring but is much larger of course. This diagonal basting holds better than straight line basting - the layers don't shift as much. These lines are about 2 1/2" apart and the stitches are about 1 1/2" to 2" long with a bite into the sandwich of about 1/2".

I guess another thing I don't like about basting is that my fingers get so sore after pulling the large needle through the fabric so many times.

Guess my break is over....back to that basting.....stitch, stitch, stitch.

Lynn

2 comments:

Elaine Adair said...

Thanks for the photo of your basting method. I've not yet tried it. Looks like a rectangular table is needed. My dining table is round.

Thanks for the closeup of your fabric - wow - I never would have guessed yoru fabrics are so uhhh, uh ordinary! Somehow, from back away, they seemed to be all carefully coordinated and matched! 8-)))

Chris said...

I just learned about fusible batting in a quilting class. I think I may be hooked. Will try it on a lap quilt very soon. I don't know how it would work on a bigger quilt.

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