#scrappytripalong Almost there

Quilt top pieced and quilt basted, I am in the home stretch on this one. When my shift ended on Wednesday, I took a little break on this quilt to finally start on my Weekender bag. Let me tell you, this bag is not for the meek. It has been incredibly time consuming, but I am almost done and ready to show off! It is rather hard, and thus I'm feeling pretty accomplished. Haha. But back to the quilt at hand.

I have to go back to Columbia today for my final shift on this project and wanted to get the Scrappy Trip Along quilt basted so that I could quilt it while in my hotel room. Basting usually goes pretty smoothly for me, but this one started out as a nightmare. The garage is full of sawdust from the chicken coop that my dad is building, and it was too windy to try to do it on the driveway. The only place left, was inside.

This is not the best idea due to the spray radius of the glue, but it was the only option. For whatever reason, no matter what my Mom and I did, we could not get the backing to lay on the batting smoothly without wrinkles. I can normally get it to lay pretty flat and even and then smooth any remaining wrinkles with my hands, but not this time. Right before I went into full meltdown mode, we called in Dad.

Naturally, Dad knew just what to do. He essentially just wallpapered the whole thing down. I know all of this is just like duh, but I normally can smooth the wrinkles out with my hands after laying down each layer. This however, gave such perfect results (I mean PERFECT, check out that backing) that I recommend it to all home quilt basters.

Here's what we did. The batting was taped to the floor to apply the backing and quilt top to the batting. It makes for easier smoothing when you have the fabric side up rather than batting side up. I like to bast half of the quilt at a time (shown below) so that you have less sticky area to control at once. So, spray basting onto batting. 

The next part is easier if you have three participants. I couldn't get any great pictures while we were mid process since I was one of the three people involved, but hopefully you get the idea. Next week I will be basting the Good Folks quilt and I will see if I can rope someone in to photograph. 

While one person smoothes, have two others hold each corner of the quilt and keep it hovered over the sticky batting. While you are smoothing from the middle towards the end of the quilt, have them slowly lay it down ahead of you. This allows controlled application of the quilt back or top to the batting that is firmly secured, and it allows any wrinkles that may appear to be smoothed out before the entire area of the quilt is set. 

End result, absolutely no wrinkles. Not even the 'i can live with those' wrinkles. I'm sure many people are like yea, obviously, BUT this opened a whole new world to me for perfectly basted quilts. Ill put up an in depth picture tutorial when we baste the Good Folks quilt!