I picked my backing fabric, and batting. Now to put everything together so I can quilt!
Basting it when you pin together the quilt top, batting material, and backing fabric of your quilt to prepare it for quilting. In order to do this you have to make a perfect quilt sandwich. First, you lay the backing fabric on the floor and tape it in place to it is secure. Then, you lay down your soft batting that is the filler of the quilt. The you place the quilt top down and you have a quilt sandwich. Both the batting and the backing fabric have to be 2″ larger on each side than the quilt top to allow for some movement when basting and quilting.
Once the quilt sandwich is made everything has to be pinned in place. Apparently you need to pin a lot… like A LOT….. like every 4 inches in rows throughout the quilt A LOT. This is because you will be moving the quilt around a lot while quilting and everything needs to be secure from all directions or there will be significant bunching in places. The basting process took time and patience. I felt those painstaking feelings that I had when I first started the quilting process and had to do all the washing and ironing. The key for me was carving out the time to do this. I sent the kids to daycare, kicked the cat out of the house, put on a podcast and called it me-time. I definitely would not have been able to do this well or happily with everyone home and jumping all over me and the quilt.
Here is my basted quilt ready for quilting! My favourite basting tutorial was from Suzy Quilts: https://suzyquilts.com/how-to-baste-a-quilt/ She gave an excellent run down of the process and options.
