Basting A Quilt

Still doing the charity quilts as I took more than usual home with me last time when I went to drop off the previous batch.

Thought I share my process as I do baste my quilts, charity or not, every time I prepare for quilting. As I am now back on the sitdown machine I do spent some time pinning my quilts first. Then I use the basting function on the Bernina Q20 to baste the quilt in an overall meander. There are three options on the machine...1/4in, 1/2in and 1in in terms of length of the stitch. I usually use the 1/2in option. When I say meander I mean this very loosely...basically I noodle around the pins in a somewhat meander way. At present I use older thread (Gutermann) to do this in any colour that I can see reasonably well. 

I baste at a fairly large scale, i.e. above... those little squares are about 3in, so I baste probably at an approximate 4in scale just going around the quilt starting at one quarter and then move clockwise around the quilt taking the pins out as I go along.

I also baste the edge, however for that I use the 1/4in stitch length and a ruler to keep the edge stitch at about 1/8in from the edge. 

Do I ever use the 1in stitch length? I have in the past basted a wholecloth (which I baste in a grid) with the 1in stitch length but found that I got my sewing foot caught up in it or even my fingers...just too much of a length of loose thread, so even for wholecloth quilts I now use the 1/2in stitch  length.

Why do I baste my quilts? 

- once its basted I don't have to worry about any pins (obviously) getting in my way. Easier for ruler quilting and gives me peace of mind in terms of inadvertently hitting a pin.

- any fullness which happens a lot in the charity quilts stays in its location rather than being quilted out to other areas.

- I use up older thread and leftover bobbin thread to baste.

- I can leave the quilt for years in its basted stage...nothing will shift, distort or become undone over time. Very handy, meaning I can start something completely different and more exciting if the inspiration bug strikes 😉

- I do like basting...I always think that the quilt is not really a quilt until it is fully basted.

Definitely more work but worth it in my humble opinion. Never had a pucker yet and have left quilts for a  considerable amount of time in this state not having to worry about unsightly holes from degraded pins...literally can just pick them up and go.

I have tried spray basting once. I know there are a lot of quilters who swear by that. I found it incredibly messy. I did it on the tiled floor next to the kitchen. I thought that I had used very little spray but it seemed that the spray had gotten everywhere! I mean everywhere...I obviously went into the kitchen in between several times and back again and found that I had some sticky residue all over the place. I had to wash the floor...not once, but twice to get rid of the sticky spots. That was it for me! Also did not like how the spray basting gummed up my needle while quilting. But, some people find it very easy and unproblematic to do which is fair enough.

For this little quilt above I did a simple allover loop design

Suits this little quilt which is about 48in square. Quilted with Gutermann thread which I am re-discovering after some years. Strong cotton thread at 50/3 weight behaving very nicely, no problem at all.

Well, still got two more charity quilts to do!

 

Karin

Basting on the Q20

I love basting on the Q20 and have been using this function extensively.

One of the things I find extraordinarily useful is the programming that is possible for the Q20. It has five slots to occupy for different thread combinations that you use all the time. 

Here are the ones that I use most with Gutermann highlighted as I put this in as a new preset. Feeling a bit frugal at the moment and decided to use some of my older threads to baste my quilts to use them up. So I decided to use the old Gutermann thread. Must admit I am not one to believe that my machine loves a particular thread like I so often read in the various quilting groups. To me it is a machine and it needs to handle whatever I throw at it from very fine 100wt Invisafil thread to the more robust 40 TEX Rasant thread. Opening the slots will show you the settings that you have set, i.e. the setting for each of the modes (BSR1 - 3 plus Manual mode. With a bit of adjustment and tweaking I set up my machine for Gutermann thread the other day so that when I come to do some basting next time I only will need to hit the program button to select Gutermann and it will set itself to the settings that I have selected. Very handy! The only thing that has happened to me from time to time is that I forget to switch programs and for example quilt with Aurifil 50/2 thread at a setting for Rasant. 

I have a short video on how to baste on the Q20 on Pinterest if you are interested. Basically I just meander over the entire quilt stitching (carefully) around my pins and taking them out as I go along. I do use a highly visible colour in order to prevent accidentally ripping into my quilting when I take the basting stitch out. The basting has 3 different options on the machine, 1in,2in and 1/4in. I use the 1/2in option for the overall meander and the 1/4in feature to secure the edges of the quilt.

For my current quilt, which is a gorgeous little quilt from the Orange Tree Quilters charity group, I used a lime green thread instead of my usual red thread as there is a lot of red colour in the quilt.

The basting is very quick, in fact this was so easy to complete I basted another one of my quilts straight after. Once basted I can leave the quilt sitting around until I am ready to do the quilting. Nothing will move, the basting keeps everything nicely secured.

Another background quilting project coming up for which I will use Invisafil thread.

Felt very frugal this week as I also stitched some batting together to make one bigger piece for another quilt. Had lots of little leftovers though and spent some time to sew them all together. Made quite a sizable piece.

This will be for practice only as I sewed them together fairly roughly and also did not concern myself too much with the different quality of the batting. It's amazing though how much you can save by just sewing strips together. This will give me two decently sized practice bits.

Happy quilting!

Karin

Basting Day

I have tried spray basting, but continue to go back to pin basting. Still doing the old 'crawling' around on the floor. Thought I show you how I pin baste on the pieced backing of that very pastel quilt I am doing.

I first tape the backing to the floor keeping it taut, but not stretched. As I got tiles in the kitchen area, I align my backing with the tiles and mark the centre of the quilt top both vertically and horizontally.

Given that this is a scrappy pieced backing I used heaps of tape to keep the backing seams nice and straight. After layering the batting, I then take the folded quilt top and align it with the centre points at the top leaving an approximate 3 in space on the top and on the side. I spend a bit of time on this to get it right so that when I unfold it will sit straight and does need to be done again (as so often happens!).

At this point I also ensure that none of my seams are folded over when I smooth it all out. Then it's on to the pinning...

I start from the centre out to the sides horizontally and vertically and then diagonally across. I probably use pins excessively but I must say that I have never had a pucker yet. I would say I approximately pin every 4in.

Once that is done I also pin around the edges. This quilt has no border so it is important that the edges do not bow out.

View of the back once I take the quilt off the floor

The other thing I do is fold the edges over and loosely attach some pins...that is not really necessary but I somehow got used to this to keep the fraying of the fabric at bay due to handling when I am quilting...makes for a nice, neat package 

Now it's on to the quilting...

Karin

Taming The Beast

I finally knuckled down and attacked the basting of my 1000 Pyramids quilt. Was unsure exactly how I would do this, i.e. whether to spray baste or to pin paste. This quilt turned out a bit big, approx. 66in x 87in! I have done spray basting before and like it but have little room to do it and also was not a friend of the mess that it created around the basted piece (i.e. had to wash the floor twice as all that sticky stuff was spread out all over the place as I got it on my socks).

Anyway, decided against the spray basting as I am also not sure how I will quilt this and thought that it would be good to get a sense of how heavy and unruly this quilt was going to be.

So I followed my trusted 'crawling around the floor' method (yep, paid for that the next day with a very sore back).

Lucky, I was by myself as there was no space left to walk around anywhere. I pin basted it very tightly as I did not want to risk any shifting or distortion as I am not going to stitch-in-the-ditch (that much I know).

I then took it to the HQ Sweet 16 and had some fun using the inbuild basting stitch (at 1/2 sec) and noodled around the pins, taking about half of them out as I went along. This went surprisingly fast and secured the quilt even more. The handling was not as bad as I thought it would be as I do have a fair amount of space around me, i.e. one extension to the left and on the right I have my cutting table, so it was just a matter of laying it out properly.

Still don't know exactly what to do...am tempted to try to do the Baptist fan with the rulers...would look lovely on that but just not sure whether this would become too difficult given it's size.

Linking up to Quilting Is More Fun Than Housework 'Oh Scrap Linky'

Karin

Basting Day

I have got 3 projects to baste. I have been piecing since the beginning of the year and am in avoidance mode, I think. This is not one of my favourite jobs...I am used to crawling around on the floor for this, however that takes me a long time as I have to build in regular breaks,  otherwise I do my back in.

On her blog Stitch by Stitch, Marelize recently suggested hand basting your quilt. She shared two little videos from Sharon Schamber on her post on how to do this.  Find the link HERE. Now that was interesting to watch and almost seems too good to be true...

Ah, habit is a funny thing...I started with the small projects today and will go from there. As you can see, I am using pins...not really my favourite, particularly on white fabric. Also discovered that some of my pins are getting rusty, so did a bit of a clean out while I went along.

I wonder whether I should try those Pinmoors















One down, two more to go...

Linking up to WIP Wednesday over at Freshly Pieced

Karin