Beginner Quilt Basting Demo: Simply Woven

Hello Friends and Welcome to Another Post!

You might find the title a little deceptive, as this is a post by a beginner rather than a guide for beginners. Many people view basting as a daunting task that stands between them and a finished quilt, and I happen to be one of those people.

I love the process of piecing together the beautiful patterns and colours that make up a quilt top, and watching the top grow and take shape, revealing additional patterns as the blocks come together. The unfortunate reality is that most of my quilts remain just tops.

As much as I love and support local quilters, I don’t have the budget to get all my quilts professionally quilted. I also know that I have the skills to quilt them all myself, not necessarily to do it well, but I will only get better with practice. I want to be able to quilt beautiful and intricate designs on all the quilts I’ve pieced, but before I can even try, I need to baste the layers together into a quilt sandwich.

Just to get us on the same page, I recommend checking out last week’s post where I share the research I did to prepare to baste this quilt. It offers a few different basting variations besides the one I will be using here, as well as links to blog posts written by more experienced quilt makers than myself. I found their experience super helpful!

Before I get started, I want to remind you all that I am a beginner to basting and quilting, this is only the second bed-sized quilt I’ve ever basted. My methods are based on trial and error, as well as the research I’ve done in the past, and are certainly not the only way to go about basting a quilt. I’m still learning and practising, so Friends, if you are in the same boat, I would love for you to join me so we can learn from each other! Or, if you’re more experienced in the art of quilt sandwich making, I would love to get your advice. Feel free to leave your tips in the comments below!

Past Quilt Basting Experience

As I just mentioned, this is the second bed-sized quilt I’ve basted, so what was the first? Anyone who has spent some time around here can probably guess it’s Rainbow Railfence. I finished this quilt in December 2020, but basted it over a full year prior to that, in the fall of 2019. I really love this quilt but I certainly didn't do a very good job basting it.

If we check out the back of the quilt, the centre is fine, but there are a few tucks around the edges. This is a direct result of bad basting, and I have a pretty good idea of some of the things I did wrong that may have caused this.

The first issue was the size of my backing. Rainbow Railfence has a whole cloth backing, meaning it is a single continuous piece of fabric without any seams. This backing was bought intentionally in an attempt to make the process a little easier. Since there would be no seams in the backing, I didn’t have to worry about additional bulk or contrasting grainlines. With my Grandma’s help, I calculated how much backing fabric I would need, including additional length to be used to make the binding.

Based on the way we calculated it, I needed to cut my binding strips across the width of fabric. However, when I cut my binding strips, I accidentally cut them along the salvage, rather than on the cross grain like I was supposed to. As a result, when I compared my backing to my quilt top, they were about the same size. Generally, you want your backing fabric to be a couple inches wider than your quilt top around all sides.

The next problem I encountered was space. At the time, my living situation provided me with very little open space for laying out quilts. The largest area I had available was about a third of the size of my quilt top. But this didn’t deter me; I had read that you can baste a quilt in sections by rolling away the excess to baste other parts, so I decided to give it a try.

It might have worked out fine, but because my backing was such a close match in size, I had to make sure everything was completely straight down the whole length of the quilt. In such limited space, I had no way of confirming how straight everything was, and my backing ended up just slightly crooked.

The final mistake I made was stretching the backing. At the time, I was aware that using tape to secure the edges of a quilt backing was fairly common practice. Taping the edges offers an easy way to keep the fabric taught and prevent any shifting.

I used painters tape, but I only had 1" wide, which is narrower than is generally recommended. 1” wide tape doesn’t quite have enough surface area to hold both the fabric and the basting surface securely, and it tends to let go of one or the other. It can work, but requires a lot of extra tape, which I don’t think I used. As a result, my backing wasn't well secured during the process, and when combined with the other two issues, resulted in me stretching and slightly warping my backing.

I’m sure all of this was not helped by the fact that I didn’t have access to a reliable iron at the time.

For the actual basting, I used safety pins. These held my three layers in place for the many moths spent quilting Rainbow Railfence, so that at least is something I did right!

A year later, I was finally done the quilting! My basting held up well through that time, but I couldn’t undo the mistakes I’d made while laying out my layers. I had to trim about 1” off of all sides of the quilt because of the crooked placement of the backing. Fortunately, I had a wide, unpieced border, and it didn't make a big difference to the visual effect of the quilt top.

As you can see, the small mistakes I made while basting added up to become a bigger problem later on. Despite that, these mistakes were not totally detrimental to the finished quilt. Sure, my backing has a few tucks, but only around the edges. And yes, I had to trim my quilt to be a little smaller than I originally planned, but it doesn't affect the overall look of the quilt.

I needed to make these mistakes for myself in order to better understand the quilting making process. And I'll need to keep making more mistakes so I can develop my skills as a quilt baster.

My apologies for the lack of pictures so far, I wasn't aware at the time that I would want to share my attempt at basting Rainbow Railfence. Fortunately, I've got lots of pictures coming up!

Basting Preparations

Before basting, I assembled the parts of my quilt sandwich. The quilt top is a pattern called Simply Woven, designed by Jess Kelly as a free pattern for the Moda blog. It's a really interesting pattern that uses precut 2 ½" strips, I would recommend it for an adventurous beginner; it uses only rectangles and straight line piecing, but has a lot of matching seams and requires quite a bit of focus and care while piecing the blocks.

Because there's so much piecing along the edges of my quilt, I probably should have used a stay stitch. A stay stitch is a line of top stitching about ⅛” in from the edge of the quilt and surrounding its perimeter. It is used to hold the seam allowances in place, and to prevent the loosening of seams while handling the quilt. If your quilt top has a solid border, like my Rainbow Railfence quilt, a stay stitch isn't necessarily.

Once you've completed your quilt top, you'll need to measure it. The size of your quilt top determines the amount of batting and backing you will need. I’ve been advised by many quilt makers that when measuring a quilt, you always measure through the middle since the edges are more inclined to stretch, providing an inaccurate measurement.

If I can, I’ll lay out my quilt flat, but I don’t have that much space in my home. Instead, I folded the quilt top in half along its width and measured along the folded edge. Unfolded it, then refolded along the length of the quilt and, once again, measured along the folded edge.

Depending on the size of the quilt top, you may run into a situation where your measuring tape is shorter than the quilt. This is actually really easy to deal with. I measure across to the largest multiple of 10 shown on the tape, in my case that would be 60”, mark that place with my finger, move the 0” marker to line up with the point I’ve marked, and continue measuring to the other side.

This measurement doesn’t need to be super precise, so if your finger marking isn’t perfect, it won’t have a negative effect on the outcome of your basting. Add together the amounts measured on your quilt top to get the full size of your quilt. My quilt measured 60” + 20 ½” for a total of approximately 80 ½" square.

As I learned from my research, I need an additional few inches around all sides of the quilt to prevent the warping that caused tucks in my Rainbow Railfence quilt, so I will need batting and backing measuring around 87" square.

The picture here is just a sample of the Hobbs brand that is sold in my area, I didn't think to take a picture of my actual batting before I unpackaged it. My batting was bought as a precut queen sized roll, measuring 90" × 108", is 80% cotton and 20% polyester, and cost about $40. This is the only batting I've ever worked with, so I don't know that I prefer it over any other types of batting. It's also larger than the size I need it to be and will get cut to size later.

For the backing, I wanted to try piecing. I had several blocks left over from the quilt top and wanted to find a way to incorporate them into the backing. Since I knew how big my backing had to be, I used the block sizes and standard width of fabric to draft a pattern for the backing. I browsed the inventory at a variety of quilt stores in my area and was lucky enough to find one carrying the Oakwood fabric line that was featured in the quilt top.

All of my materials were bought last fall. I was getting close to finishing my Rainbow Railfence quilt and was excited to try quilting my next UFO. As I’m sure you can tell, I didn’t get around to it quite as fast as I thought I would, and in the time that has passed since then, I lost the piecing diagram for my backing. Fortunately, I remembered the motif I wanted to use and was able to redo my calculations to make the backing.

I don’t think the black accent panels were part of the original, if I remember correctly, those were supposed to be made of the Oakwood fabric as well. Even with that in mind, I bought way too much backing, so I have lots of it to use in a future project! I’m glad I made that change though. I think the black panels add a lot to the backing and are more cohesive with the blocks and with the quilt top too!

Basting Simply Woven

Once I had all the pieces I needed, I could start constructing the quilt sandwich. The largest flat area I have available right now is about half the size of the quilt, so I had to baste one half at a time. You would think I learned after last time to try basting a quilt flat, but with social distancing measures in place, I’m making do with what I have. And if I keep trying it this way, it has to work eventually, right?

Based on my research, I decided to mark the halfway points on all 4 sides of my backing and quilt top. I used straight pins to do this and it worked well for me.

I laid out the quilt backing right side facing down, with the wrong side, including all my seams facing up. I rolled up the second half of the quilt to keep it out of the way, and prevent it from getting tucked under the part of the quilt I wanted to baste. I also checked to make sure the pins marking the centre points were flat on the floor and not rolled into the excess, I want to be sure I’m actually basting half the quilt and not thirds again.

Once I was sure everything was placed properly, I started securing the edges of the backing with tape. I started in one corner and used small pieces of tape, about the length of my hand. I smoothed out any creases in the backing adding more tape around the edges as I went. I only taped the sides that were flat on the floor, relying on the weight of the roll of excess fabric to keep the last side taught.

For the batting layer, it's a good idea to give your batting time to rest. This helps to remove wrinkles and encourages the bathing to lay smoothly. If you can, lay it out on the backing and let the whole thing rest overnight. I was basting in a common area and wasn't able to do that though, so I proceeded without this step.

In hindsight, I could have let my batting rest another way, like by draping it over a table for the night. Instead, it was left packaged as a tightly rolled log until a few minutes before I added it to the sandwich. Maybe not the best decision, but I don’t think it will be a problem.

My batting was larger than my backing by quite a bit, so I aligned the batting in one corner of the backing, and used my hands to smooth it out. I found that the batting had enough texture that friction held it in place quite nicely. When I reached the other side of the quilt, I double checked that no parts of the batting were folded over and cut it to the same width as the backing.

It's hard to see in the pictures, but the green painters tape was visible through the batting and I was able to use that as a guide to cut. It's important to cut the batting to the same size as the backing, or slightly smaller, so that I could see the pins marking the centres of the backing edges.

I rolled up the batting for the second half of the quilt, just like I did with the backing, to keep it out of the way.

The last piece of the quilt sandwich was the quilt top. Since this quilt top has been folded up for a while, it was really important to press the whole thing to get rid of creases and make sure the seams were lying flat and in the right directions.

Just as on the backing, I marked the centre of each side with a pin. This is going to help to position the quilt top in the centre of the quilt sandwich.

I placed the quilt top on the batting with the right side facing up and all the seams hidden inside the sandwich. Using the three visible pin markings, I centred the quilt top. By having three reference points, I think I was able to get it fairly well centred. I think all of them were aligned within ½”. Once I felt it was in the right place, I smoothed out the quilt top and did a final check of all the centre markings.

When I quilted Rainbow Railfence, I used pin basting, and I wanted to try it again with Simply Woven. Starting in the centre of the quilt, I pinned the quilt sandwich together one block at a time. I used safety pins to pierce through the three layers of the quilt and hold them together, smoothing the quilt top more thoroughly as I did. In case you weren’t sure, this process involves a lot of quilt petting.

Several of the blogs I referenced in my last post suggested placing a pin about every 4", so I chose to take their advice. On a 80 ½” square quilt, that’s a lot of safety pins, and closing so many safety pins can be hard on your fingers. While there are specialty tools to help with this, I opted to follow a tip from Johanna Maskoe.

Johanna was the guest speaker at my quilt guild’s February meeting, where she presented a lecture called “Make Do and Mend.” This lecture included a demonstration for using a regular dining spoon to help you close safety pins. I found that it worked really well once I got used to the process.

To use it, slide the bowl of the spoon under the point of the safety pin, positioned as shown in the picture. You want the pin to be positioned perpendicular to the length of the spoon, and the edge of the spoon dipped down to touch the quilt. Using your free hand, steady the safety pin. Rotate the spoon so it pushes the point of the safety pin up, then manoeuvre it into the clasp with your second hand to close the pin.

It took a little practice to get the hang of, but I think using this method sped up the basting process for me. With the first half of the quilt done, I peeled off the tape and rolled up the basted part of the quilt.

Unfortunately, at this point, I ran out of safety pins and couldn't get started on basting the second half until the next day. To store the quilt for the night, I unrolled the unbasted layers and smoothed them out on the floor as before, but without taping anything. I wanted to avoid creating any new wrinkles since it would be very challenging to iron the layers with half the quilt already basted.

The next day, after purchasing more safety pins, I repeated the process on the second half of the quilt; position and smooth out the backing, securing the edges with tape. Position and smooth out the batting, trimming the edges wherever necessary. Position the quilt top using the marked centres to align it with the backing. Pin the layers together, starting from the centre of the quilt and smoothing out the quilt top as you go.

With that, I've completed the basting on my quilt sandwich and I'm one step closer to another finished quilt!

A lot of people find this process to be quite exhausting or tedious, especially with a quilt as large as Simply Woven, and it takes more time than one would expect. That's not to say the time spent basting can't be enjoyable. Set up a movie, some music, or an audiobook to keep you company, allow yourself breaks whenever you need them, and move at your own pace. You could also invite a friend to help you, if they also have a quilt to baste, you could help them in return.

Remember Friends, your project will wait patiently for whenever you may be ready to work on it. When you're still learning, it's really important to approach your projects with a good attitude, you will learn to much more with an open mind and feel so much more confident knowing you're project was created to the best of your abilities!

So Friends, that's all for this post. I hope I've inspired some of you to take another step on a UFO, or at least helped you to better understand the basting process. If you don't think you're ready to try quilting your own project just yet, feel free to hold onto it until you are, or to find a local quilter to do that for you!

For any of you who have basted a quilt recently, or will be doing so in the near future, please let me know how it goes! You can leave me a comment below or send me an email through my contact page. I would also love to see photos of your basting set up, feel free to tag me on Instagram, @vafibrearts, or leave a post in my Facebook group!

Until next time Friends, Happy Basting!

VA