Tag: Basting

Basting Saturday (Take 2)


The other quilt that I worked on Saturday was a “White on White” quilt that I have had for a number of years but simply haven’t gotten around to doing.

The top was given to me by Elsie, who was a member of our guild. She had started hand quilting it, but hadn’t gotten very far along. I took out her hand quilting, thinking that I would use the piece to practice my machine work. ……. This was maybe 5 or 6 years ago

Then I decided that I wanted to add some trapunto to the piece, so spent quite a bit of time getting the extra batting sewed on and ready to quilt.

The piece had a pillow-top that I was not interested in, so I cut it off, practiced my quilting and then tried washing out the blue lines. Well, they did not immediately come out!!!! I contacted the company that made the piece and they told me that it was only guaranteed to come out for about 2 years. She did suggest that I try washing it in Shout and Oxi-Clean, and that seemed to help remove the lines.

The bottom line here is that I have NO idea whether the lines will wash out once I finish the quilting, but have decided that it is a good practice piece regardless.

I had planned to pin-baste this quilt, but decided that I would just use a Basting Spray and get it over with. Who knows if that will further hinder the line’s disappearing act.

I had thought I would use a variegated King Tut thread, but didn’t like the way it looked in the final analysis, so have decided to just use a beige thread and let the texture do the talking….hopefully with no interruptions from the nasty blue lines!!!!

Basting Saturday

Yesterday, I spent the day making backs and basting a couple of quilts that I have in progress.

The first one was the top that I showed a couple of weeks ago…..I am really pleased with how it turned out.

However, the back is probably the ugliest one in all of history. I decided to try Bonnie Hunter’s (http://www.quiltville.com/) idea of cutting scrap fabrics into 10-1/2 inch squares and piecing them together to form the back.

Well, the first thing that I learned is that not all fabrics will allow you to get four 10.5 inch squares out of one width. I think that I will use 9.5 or 10 inch squares next time.

The second thing that I learned is that you need to be a bit more careful in selecting colors for these squares……I think that I had too much variety in color and print design.

As I pieced these squares into strips, I realized that I had not done a wonderful job of cutting the squares and some of the sides didn’t line up properly. SO, after I had pieced each strip, I put it on the cutting board and evened the edges up….making the square not EXACTLY square.

I knew that I didn’t want to match seams, so I sewed the ends of the strips together into a circle and then randomly cut in the middle of one of the squares. I took them out to my garage (the only place that gives me enough open floor space) and decided on a decent pattern.

My NEXT mistake came in sewing these rows together……I apparently put one (or maybe two) of the rows together backwards and ended up with a whole series of squares of the same color together. Oh well…..it is only the back!!!!

I used Hobbs Fusible Batting to put this quilt together. Now I have to leave it for a few weeks until I get a brilliant idea for how to quilt it……I would welcome any ideas.