Cindy's Baskets---First Day

I have spent the day basting the basket top on the frame for Olivia and I to work on. Olivia is my hand guided Gammill Classic Plus.

I don't have robotics hooked to her. We just dance along all on our own.

There is one thing for sure now, I know every piece of fabric in this quilt top. I know where the problems might arise and where we can just coast along. There is so much bias in this top that you have to expect some fullness, so I wanted to get that out of the way to start with.

 Look at these three pictures and you can see how all of the bias edges in the quilt can effect it. Cindy did an outstanding job of piecing this together without a lot of distortion in the quilt. I expect to find some distortion but always hope for just a little. Some piecers can do this well, some not so much.







In the first picture you are looking straight down the frame. In the second I am at a slight angle. In the third I am shooting at a greater angle. You can see that there is some 'waving' of the top.









The real problem with this top comes with that beautiful pieced border. I love them. I use them alot on my own quilts. But, they can be a real PIA when it comes to quilting the top. As you can see in some of these pictures, we have a few issues to deal with.

The trick here is to 'tame' the border. Truthfully, I am not really worried about this amount of fullness. It is really minimal and will be 'sucked up' with the quilting.

One thing I would suggest though for future reference, ALWAYS stay-stitch your borders. Makes no difference if it is pieced or not, if you stay-stitch, it will help to keep your borders stable. This can be even more important with a pieced border or borders with mitered corners.

OK, I have it all basted on the frame and I did run horizontal basting stitches across about every 6 inches. There are also over 500 pins in this top, so, it is not going anywhere. I got to the bottom of the quilt and this is the "WHOLE" 2 inches of backing that I had left over.

I was also concerned about the clearance of the backing roller with the full quilt on it. I have been able to determine that I will have plenty of clearance and not have to worry about that. If the 'sandwich' had been to thick to clear the machine, I would have just un-zipped it from the backing roller and moved it to the front roller on my frame...........Love zippered leaders.

OK, so we are finished for today. In the morning we will start anew. We will SID (stitch in the ditch) until the cows come home. At that point the whole quilt will be stabilized and all of the basting will come out and all of the pins, and then the feathering fun begins............I love this quilt!!!!

Hope you have a good evening. I have a nice glass of wine and I am heading out to grill me a steak. See you tomorrow.