Basting my first quilt.

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You can see my first patchwork quilt top in my blog post here.

I love the way that it turned out - not bad for my first attempt. I had absolutely no idea how to turn this into a quilt so I looked for a tutorial online and found this by Melanie Ham. I had already done the patchwork but in the first video but next was the process of basting in this video number 2.

I’d never even heard of basting before but it seems to be just layering up all of the bits that want to be attached together and pinning them getting them ready to sew together. It happened a bit like this:

I bought a flat sheet online to use as the backing of my quilt. To baste it (not sure how you spell it!) I started off by taping the sheet out to the floor as tight as I could, starting in one corner. The tutorial said I needed to leave about 4 inches around each side - I think I ended up leaving about 6 inches as I was nervous of doing something wrong and I thought this would give me a bit of extra room for error if I needed it.
 After taping the frat 2 sides I cut the other two down to size.
 I was very careful to make sure that I cut these into the cutting mat and kept moving this along underneath to make sure I didn’t mark the floor.
Once all of the backing was cut to size and taped in place I then had to lay out the quilt piece that I had bought. I didn’t cut it down to size although it’s supposed to be the same size as the backing as it wasn’t much bigger anyway so I didn't bother. My thinking was that the final cut from this was going to be to remove any excess anyway and a slightly larger bit on one side might come in handy for something else some day.
 I was dead chuffed when I had it all pinned out - I think I put a pin in about every 3rd square of the patchwork but as you’ll see in my next post that wasn’t quite enough once I started quilting it.



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