Basting

There's not much going on this week...  Hand quilting the large Liberty quilt but nothing fantastic to show there...  It is all stitch-in-the-ditch.

Here is Cleo making himself comfortable this morning on the quilt.  I can't keep the felines off the quilts so I will give it a good going over with sticky paper before I pass the quilt on to the next quilter.  Or maybe I won't because she has two cats too!  It will be more efficient to use the sticky paper before the quilt goes up on the wall.  (I am SOOOOO glad that the other quilter has cats!  Then all the cat hair can't be blamed on me alone.)

Someone asked about how we baste our quilts.  Well, I think I've tried every way in the book!  Normally, my friends and I use Japanese basting thread which is wonderful for taking out after the quilt is quilted.  It is sold by the skein and can be cut to uniform lengths with one snip of the scissors.  Thread basting works out best when I am hand quilting and using a hoop.

When I started machine quilting I began using safety pins as the books suggested that this was a very easy way to remove the basting every time the machine needle came to a basted part.  That has been somewhat successful but my fingers got sore putting in the pins and I also would forget to remove them and suddenly the sewing machine was stuck at a safety pin.  Nowadays I thread baste even for machine quilting but I still use safety pins for test quilting pieces that I practice on.

I don't know how I found out about the spray basting but that is a wonderful invention!  The drawback of course is the cost...  and in Japan it is REALLY expensive!  Still, I keep a can of spray baste around for smaller quilts that I am going to machine quilt, especially the McKenna quilts that require heavy machine quilting.  Cost wise, it is just not practical to spray baste the larger quilts I make.

The one exception was last summer when I was making three identical photo quilts for my sister-in-law.  (I don't know why I didn't take a picture of all three quilts together but I didn't...)  Three tops were made and together we got down on the floor and thread basted one.  Unused to the work, Marcy was sweating and finding basting to be a harder job than she expected.  With two more quilts to go I bought the spray baste and the ease with which the quilts got basted (in seconds) immediately made Marcy a spray basting fan!  And you know...  when I'd finished quilting the three quilts, the two spray basted ones looked MUCH better than the thread basted one...  For those photo quilts the spray takes away the poof you get with just thread basting (and which distorted the photos a bit).  Live and learn.

Then a few years ago I had knee surgery and for quite a few months I couldn't crawl around the floor.  The plus to that situation was that my quilting friends did all my basting for me!  But one shouldn't stretch friendship too far so I needed to find a way to do my own basting again.  A blog friend told me about board basting and that has been another life saver!  Nowadays I often baste large quilts on my kitchen table with thread using two long boards.  The "inventor" (?) of board basting, Sharon Schamber, uses a tailor's stitch to baste and that too has really worked well for me.

One last "hint".  When I'm basting with thread I like to use "cheater needles".  You know, the ones where you don't have to thread the needle and instead just pull the thread down through the end...  Though I'd never use a cheater needle to quilt (too long, too thick) I don't like wasting my time poking basting thread through my needle eyes (and my OWN eyes are not so great anymore!) so the cheater needles have been very convenient.  They are also great when burying the ends of threads after machine quilting.

And I guess while I'm talking about tools, though these aren't used for basting, they are ever-present when I am hand quilting.  The square thing is called Aunt Becky and I use it under the quilt to poke the quilting needle back to the top of the quilt.  It takes some practice to use but I have found it makes my stitches smaller.  Most of my friends can't get used to it at all though...  And I must have a recessed thimble for my top hand's middle finger.  The pink thing is always on my right forefinger and helps pull the quilting needle through the quilt after putting in four or five stitches...  And you saw my quilting hoop...  the one Cleo has made a nest in...