Basting is the point where a quilt stops being portable. The top is finished, the backing is pressed, and the next step traditionally involves clearing the largest floor in the house, kneeling on it for an hour, and smoothing outwards from the centre while your knees register a complaint. Plenty of quilts have been basted that way and plenty more will be. What follows is the alternative, which needs a table, three lengths of timber and some tape, and which never asks you to see the whole quilt at once.
The principle is worth stating plainly before the steps. Each of the three layers is taped along one edge to its own length of wood and rolled up on it, so that instead of a quilt you have three tidy rolls. Those rolls are then unwound across the table a band at a time, one arm's width of quilt for each pass, and each band is secured before the next is exposed. The wood holds the layers straight and taut across their full width while your hands do the smoothing and the securing. The boards are ordinary timber from a hardware shop, a length or two longer than the quilt is wide, and they cost very little. Nothing about this needs a specialist frame.
Here is how each part of it earns its place:
- Rolling each layer separately solves what spreading the whole quilt cannot. Laid out flat, the three layers are in contact along their entire area from the first moment, and every adjustment you make to one of them travels into the other two. Push a wrinkle out of the backing and it reappears as a ripple in the wadding two feet away, because there is nowhere for the excess to go. Rolled separately, the layers only meet where you are working, in a band you can see and reach in full. Each one arrives already flat, having been wound onto its board under even tension, and it meets its neighbour along a single line rather than across an entire floor. Problems become local, and a local problem can be corrected without disturbing anything already finished.
- The board holds tension evenly right across the width, which hands cannot. Tension applied with your hands is applied at two points, and everything between those points is guesswork. Pull a little harder with the right hand than the left and the layer arrives skewed, with the difference distributed invisibly across the middle. A rigid length of wood applies the same tension along every inch of the edge at once, because it cannot bend. That is the whole reason the method works: the straightness is a property of the tool rather than a skill you have to supply repeatedly, and it does not vary as your arms tire in the second half of the job.
- Use the seam lines of the top to check you are winding on straight. As the top goes onto its board, watch the piecing seams that run across the width and compare them with the edge of the wood. They should stay parallel to it, and they are a far better guide than the raw edge of the quilt, which can wander. If a seam line starts to run at an angle to the board, the top is going on skewed, and every band you unroll afterwards will carry that skew forward into the layering. Stop, unwind back past the point where it started drifting, and wind it on again. It costs a few minutes at the start and saves discovering a twist when there are already two hundred pins in the quilt.
- Work one arm's width at a time and let the finished part fall off the table. The section you expose should be no wider than you can reach across comfortably without putting your weight on the layers, because leaning on a basted section shifts it. Your reach is the correct unit of work. Just as important is where the completed part goes: over the far edge of the table, hanging free. Quilters instinctively pile the finished section on the table beside them, and it then drags on what has not been secured yet, pulls the layers out of true and gets in the way of the next band. Letting it hang keeps the work surface for the work.
- Secure each band with safety pins or with temporary spray adhesive. Both hold the three layers together for quilting and both suit this method, because both are applied to one band at a time. Pins are placed by hand across the exposed section, can be repositioned as you go, and are removed while you quilt, which means working around them at the machine. Spray bonds the full area of the band at once with nothing left on the surface to negotiate, and it wants a well ventilated room and something down to catch the overspray. Neither is the correct answer. Pick whichever suits your room, your hands and how you like to quilt, and use it the same way in each band.
Seeing the rolls unwound across a table makes the sequence obvious in a way that a description cannot, particularly how little of the quilt is in play at any one moment:
What this really changes is the size of the thing you have to manage. A quilt on the floor asks you to control an entire surface at once, and that is why basting has a reputation for being the least loved hour of the whole process. Rolled onto boards, it asks you for one band at a time, and each band is finished before the next one appears. The quilt has not become smaller. It has become a series of pieces of work that fit on your table, and that turns out to be the difference between putting the job off for a fortnight and starting it on a Tuesday evening.
