Basting Does Not Mean That You Are Cooking a Turkey

Megan is away for the week, and so it is eerily quiet around the house.  The weather is warming up, my daffodils are starting to bloom, and Max is spending more time outside.  Brian is spending the days working in his office. THE HOUSE IS MINE!!!!!

So this means that it is time to do some of those tasks that require commandeering large amounts of space.  This week, that means that I will be sandwiching and basting all of my finished quilt tops, and then they will be ready to put on the trusty Bernina in order get them quilted this year.  Now, a little bit about quilting those carefully pieced and colorful quilt tops. My grandmother taught me how to sew and quilt in when I was 9, so I did get a few quilts made in my early days, but finishing them was a very daunting task for me. I kept sewing, but gave up quilting for a long time. I started quilting again in the mid 1980s and learned to machine quilt from Harriet Hargraves, the mother of modern day machine quilting, when she came to give a lecture and workshop at an East Bay Heritage Quilters Guild meeting in the late 1980s.  I loved the fact that I no longer had to do hand quilting, and that my quilt could be finished in days instead of weeks or months. Lots of people send their quilts out to established quilters who use special quilting machines (called longarm quilting machines) to complete the task.  But I have always been a "process" kinda gal, who wants to control the entire endeavor from start to finish.  Since I don't have a longarm quilting machine, I use my regular sewing machine (an old Bernina 1260) to complete my task.  It is not ideal, but it works for me.

Before I can put a quilt under the needle of my machine, the quilt top (the "fancy" part that is made up of colorful fabric pieces) needs to be layered together with batting (the soft middle part of the quilt) and a backing (fabric that is the underside of the quilt).  This is called "sandwiching" a quilt  - think of the fabric as bread and the batting as the filling.  Once you have the pieces layered up, you need to figure out how to hold all the layers together.  I used to pin the layers together with safety pins but have turned to basting since my good friend Dorothy shared Sharon Schamber's basting technique with me.  I find that basting takes a bit longer, but it is fine because the rhythm of basting is almost meditative.  Also, basting holds the layers together better for me and less slipping of layers means the back of the quilt does not have fabric bunching up or forming folds and pleats.

Basting takes up the entired dining room.  After putting all of the leaves in the dining room table I lay the backing fabric (wrong side facing up) on the table, and cover it with the batting.  Everything is smoothed out by hand as I line up the top edges of the backing and batting.  Then I dig out my "basting boards"  - two 8 foot long pieces of wall moulding that came from the local Yardbirds store before it was closed by Home Depot  (Boo! Hiss!!!). One of the boards is lined up even with the previously noted top edges, and the quilt backing and batting are wound tighlty and smoothly around the board with about a foot of the bottom edges left unwound.  The the same thing is done with the quilt top - the top edge is lined up with the basting board and the quilt top is wound tightly and smoothly around the board with approximately a foot of the bottom left unwound.

Next, the loose bottom edges of the quilt top, batting and backing are lined up and the layers are smoothed out against one another.  The boards are carefully unwound, ensuring that the layers remain straight and smooth, until the sandwich covers the width of the table. Using a fine milliner's needle and size 20 DMC cotton, the basting begins in the lower left hand corner and travels away from me toward the basting boards.  When I get as close as I can to the boards, I move the next row of basting over to the left,  and start basting toward me again.  This zig-zag pattern continues until all of the unwound sandwich is basted.  Then I unwind more of the fabrics and batting so that unbasted materials once again cover the table.    The quilt top you see in these photos is 60" X 70", and it took 2 1/2 hours to baste.

When I get this quilt onto my machine, I will share some machine quilting photos and tips with you.