Basting the Bear's Quilt

I've mentioned before that basting and marking a quilt isn't my most favorite thing.  I've tried basting with needle and thread (kill me now), spray basting (quick but makes me nervous about gumming up the machine), and pinning.  I've basted on my family room floor, kitchen counters, and dining room table.  There's no way around it - it's a hassle.  That's my excuse for why the Bear is still sleeping under his train quilt.  Oh, it won't kill him!

I was whining about it to discussing this with the WannaBees last week, and Jodi suggested that I try Sharon Schamber's method with two boards.  Jodi even had the boards for me to borrow, so that's hard to turn down.  I'm not going to go into a big discussion of how to do it when the video is a much better tool, except to say that I chose to pin instead of basting with needle and thread.  It still worked great.  I will also say that it is much easier to do with a tiny quilt, like Sharon does in the video, than a twin sized quilt, but it still worked better than the floor or taping the back to my kitchen counters in sections.

 

Here you can see that this fit on my dining room table.  It was nice, as Jodi mentioned, to be able to sit at the table and pin a section in between other tasks vs. crawling around on the floor begging the dogs to stay off the quilt for just a few minutes. 

Who? Me?

I also realized that this was a perfect time to mark the quilt.  The quilt is laying nice and flat on a large table, so you can see all the points you want to match up and have enough room to lay a long ruler across it.  I used my favorite white pen again and marked the cross hatching in no time at all. 

I hope to start the quilting today, although I definitely need more thread.  I'm not sure what I was thinking when I bought only one spool.  Luckily Mom and I are going on a field trip this week to A Scarlet Thread, the largest quilt shop in Georgia! 

Below are links to the two videos.  Let me know if you've tried this method and liked it, or if I am missing out on something else. 

Thanks so much to Sharon Schamber for sharing this technique, as well as the many free tutorials on her website.  She is a fountain of information!  Also, thanks to Jodi for letting me try out the boards. 



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