On Thursday, I showed you my process for basting quilts on the design wall, rather than crawling all over the floor!!

That quilt went well….

The next one did NOT…

You see, the day that I put the batting together, I was not in a very good mood and just wanted to be done with it. Consequently, I didn’t measure it well enough…. but I didn’t know that when I started.

I pinned the batting to the design wall…..

… and positioned the top over the batting…..

…and could see that it was going to be a close fit!

But, not deterred, I sprayed and added the backing fabric and then trimmed it off to “match” the frankenbatting..

When I turned it around, I could see exactly where my problem was going to be….

I put the top on again and could DEFINITELY see where my problem was….

There was a BIG section without any batting…..

And yes, I could have started over and fixed the batting, but I chose to do something different….

I simply added two smaller pieces of batting to the naked fabric….

Remember that the backing fabric had basting spray on it and the top will have been sprayed as well!!

Before I took the top off to be sprayed, I marked the top edge and corner of the top …..

…so that I could be CERTAIN that it would end up in the correct place.

After spraying the top, I added it to the batting sandwich, ensuring that it matched the marked areas exactly!!….

I pinned the top into place…..

Amazingly, it worked…..

I took the additional precaution of placing a few pins into the “un-attached” batting….

Here it is laid out on the bed to “rest”.

Is this the perfect solution? ….NO!!

But, did it work in this situation? Absolutely!!

Once I have quilted the borders, I believe that the “error” will be unnoticeable.

But, I will certainly be more diligent next time I make “FRANKEN-BATTING”!!

Last week I had a “basting day”, with a couple of charity quilts that needed to be basted so that I can get to work on the quilting.

Both were small enough that I could do them on my design wall. Here is the original video that I put out about basting on my design wall…..

But I had one problem with this system. When I started with the backing on the wall first and then added each of the next two layers, often the backing fabric had folds in it!!

NOT GOOD!!

So, this time I decided to start with the batting on the wall….

….spray the backing fabric and add it to the batting. I marked the center of the batting and the backing so I had a good idea of where it would fall. I smoothed and pinned the top edge…..

I then opened up the rest of the fabric and let it fall….

Then I used my ruler to smooth the two pieces together…..

Since I now knew that the backing fabric was well attached to the batting…..

…. I took the two pieces off of the wall and turned them around so that the backing was against the wall and the batting was on the outside.

I then sprayed the top and pinned it to the batting and backing…..

…..let it fall naturally…..

….and used the ruler to smooth the top onto the batting and back….

I then took it off the wall, and laid it out to “rest on my bed…..

Okay….one charity quilt basted!!

The second one did NOT go as smoothly.

Come back on Saturday to hear the story of the VERY frightening Frankenbatting!!