Sunday, April 22, 2012

Basting Spree

Before I can go on a quilting spree, I needed to get some quilts pin-basted. I bought more pins recently, and I have a lot of pins, so I managed to get 12 baby quilts pin-basted before I ran out of pins! I don't baste baby quilts as heavily as large quilts, because they don't get as squished when quilting them, it's just easier to keep them flat. On a large quilt, I put pins about every 2-3 inches, on a baby quilt I'll go 4 inches between pins. So far it's worked fine for me.

I just did a quick count, and unless I have quilt tops hiding somewhere (entirely possible) I have 11 more that aren't basted. Only two of those are baby quilts, the rest are throw sized or larger. I definitely won't be basting 12 quilts next basting spree, I'll run out of pins much sooner. I have two quilts in assembly stage now, so by the time I have my next basting spree, I will likely have 13 quilt tops in the queue.

Almost all of the quilt tops I just basted were made last year. This year most of my piecing has just been Orca Bay and the pink/black beast, and those two quilts had a LOT of piecing, easily over 10,000 pieces between them. I did piece the rally quilt, and a baby quilt this year, along with assembling a couple quilt tops that I had made the blocks for last year, but mostly, I worked on Orca Bay and the P/B beast.

The Juki I quilt on, is all ready to go for the quilting spree, and when I move the basted quilts off of my Bernina cabinet I can use it too. I will likely go between projects as I please. I have some garments to make, so having both machines available and set up for different types of sewing is great! I am so thankful I have a sewing room and I'm not stuck sewing on the kitchen table anymore. Having a dedicated sewing space was key for me to get more sewing done.

1 comment:

Katie M. said...

WOW - that's ambitious! The having to pin baste is what prompted me buying my first quilting set up, which just happened to be a Juki on a Gracie frame. Loved that Juki, they are great machines. Sure wish they'd come out with a minimum 18" throat space machine......