Wheelchair quilt: planning and piecing

It's ridiculous how easily I get chilled, so I've decided to make myself a wheelchair quilt.  I do have something already, a length of black polar fleece folded over double.  Only it always blows up in the wind, and it's hardly inspiring, and tends to get lost in the cupboard and never used.  For this quilt, I plan to do something nifty with velcro so that I can easily attach it to the footplates, and the quilt will moonlight as an extra layer to grab for the bed or sofa when needed. The fleece is a good size, 36" x 30".

There were lots of triangular bits left over from the stripes I used for R's bedspread, due to cutting all those quarter-square triangles, so I went for 3" half-square triangles (HSTs), with random placement.  I've fancied doing a randomised HST quilt for a while, and when hunting through photos of quilts made with striped fabrics on Pinterest, came across the 80s and 90s quilts of Michael James, which helped me visualise it.  I still have a bag full of scraps, but a lot of them made it into this quilt, and it was surprisingly easy to mark up and cut.  It took only a few days to cut the 238 triangles required, and then a day for putting them up on the design wall, staring at it, and rearranging until I was happy.  I've never designed a quilt top so fast, it's amazingly liberating, and everyone has been blown away by it.

Nifty, eh?  I cut most of the pieces before I started to arrange them on the wall, then cut the last few based on what I felt it needed.  They're almost all Kaffe Fassett woven stripes, plus a Peppered Cotton in green.  I'd put in one in rust, too, but it looked oddly dirty next to the stripes.

There's a little mini design board on my sewing desk, made from polystyrene board and some batting, and that's enough to hold 20 of these blocks at once, so I'm transferring a sixth of the top to that at a time for piecing, and have made the first section.  I photographed it and refer to that, and still ended up with one block rotated by 180 degrees, but it's a flexible design and it looks fine.  The blues and greens are the ones I'm pickier about.  What is really striking is how much smaller the pieces are when sewn.  It's only a 1/4" seam allowance, but the area ends up 40% less.  Here's the mini design board with the blocks on the left sewn.

Robert Kaufman Shetland flannel

This quilt is intended to be small but really warm.  I'm going to use two layers of Polydown, a fairly high-loft batting, and a Robert Kaufman flannel on the back, one of his Shetland flannel range in a gorgeous herringbone weave and the "pumpkin" colourway.  I've got quite a few of these flannels tucked away in my stash, as I have plans to make some heavy quilts in the future.

The next question is how to quilt it.  Crowfooting would be too busy, and while I may be up to big stitch quilting on the right combintion of fabrics and batting, this isn't that.

So I looked at the tacking stitches available again.  Cross stich has never really appealed to me, and neither does the Mennonite tack, which forms an elongated cross and looks a bit too religious for my taste.  I'm not from a Christian background, and probably wouldn't want it on my quilts even if I were.  (This is also why you won't see me doing the cross blocks popular in improv piecing.)


The stich I've decided on is the Methodist knot.  There are instructions for all of these tacking stitches in the book Rotary Riot, by Judy Hopkins and Nancy Martin, and someone was kind enough to send me photographs of the relevant pages.  I believe they can also be classified as a form of utility quilting, and tacking doesn't seem quite right to me, it sounds too much like basting when it's a permanent form of stitching, not to mention that I'm spacing it relatively closely.  This knot is formed by making two backstitches, one long and one short, looking rather like an exclamation mark and leaving a single horizontal stitch on the back of the quilt.  I've made up a sample sandwich and it works out nicely, with a surprising amount of texture and direction added by the lopsided stitch.  There's a lovely variegated DMC embroidery thread in copper/rust tones which looks perfect against the quilt, and groups online tell me I should be OK using embroidery thread, though I'll test first in case of bleeding.

I'll stitch a line down the centre diagonal of each triangle, which will bring out the pattern and mean that my lines of stitching are a nice 2" apart.  After drawing it out at full scale, I think I'll go for two stitches per triangle rather than three, though both look good.  The spacing on the samples are closer, more like how it would be with three stitches per triangle.  It still obeys my rule of doubling the distance between stitches for the distance between lines of stitching at a minimum, and judging from my sample piece, will still create the effect of lines of quilting in terms of indenttion.  It's been suggested to me that it shouldn't be too dense anyway, in order to maximise pockets of air and thus warmth.

Looking up wheelchair quilt design online was an odd experience.  I picked up some good tips - back it with flannel so that it's warm and less likely to slip off, cut off the corners so they don't get caught in the wheels - but mostly I saw lots of waffling from people who have never used a wheelchair and haven't bothered to consult any wheelchair users.  You could practically make a bingo card.

* well over a foot too long and/or wide. Bonus points for being two feet too long!

* top of quilt drapes over the wheels so that they can't be pushed

* bottom of quilt trails on ground

* quilt has entirely eaten the wheelchair user

* headless model in photos

* remarks about how the quilt is needed "in case your skirt or dress rides up" (we can pick our own clothing and be sexy if we want to, OK?)

* "wheelchair bound" or "confined to a wheelchair" (it's not a bondage accessory)

* telling people to buy it for the wheelchair user, rather than being anything an actual wheelchair user would pick

* three quilt blocks and acres of border, leading to a rather odd apron effect, and always combined with an unbelievably twee design

* footplates entirely absent, and the grinning Random Old Lady Model wearing slippers

* size explicitly designed around multiples of a quilt block, rather than what will actually fit the user

* batting skipped, resulting in a quilt that won't be nearly warm enough (we tend to run colder than people who are walking about)

I ask you.  Thankfully I did chat to some quilters who are wheelchair users, and a few more people who have worked with wheelchair users and respect us, rather than the dreaded "well I made quilts for an old people's home once" ones.  It's always depressing how many people think they should get cookies for merely knowing someone disabled.  We're a sixth of the population!  Of course you know some of us!  And if we say we want batting that dries quickly in case we get caught in the rain, we do know what we're talking about!

Temperature quilt plans

I have this idea in my head that I only work on one quilt at a time.  OK, a piecing project at my flat and a quilting project for when I'm at R's flat every other week.  Fine, then, each of those, plus I have now fallen in love with temperature quilts, where you make a block each day.  That'll only be a little extra, right?

The idea with these is that you set out a code for which colour each temperature corresponds to, and then make a block for each day in the year, showing the temperature variations through the ebb and flow of colours.  I'm going to do the version with two pieces per day, one for the high temps and one for the low temps.  Since I'm starting halfway through the year, I'll make it to cover 2019, but when it gets to 2020, I'll be doing the block for that day for the previous year instead.  It's too much to catch up with otherwise.

There are several ways you can do this.  Flying geese blocks are popular, half-square triangles turn up in various incarnations, there are some exciting variants with hexagons, and sometimes people use strips.  If you are going to have the day of the month as your rows and the month as your columns, you end up with rectangular blocks if you want to end up with a square quilt.

Linen stack

I've decided to do two horizontal strips to make a block, stacked to make larger sections, which I suppose is a form of string quilt.  Right now I'm at R's and don't have access to my stash, but I've just received a set of linen blend samples in an order from Fabric Inspirations, so these work as a mock-up.  The strips won't be dead horizontal, but rather slightly angled and curved, giving it a more organic feel.

Temperature quilt by Erin

This is a traditional temperature quilt using flying geese, to give you an idea of how they most often look.  The centre triangle in each block shows the high temperatures, and the two smaller triangles on either side show the low temperatures.

As I will be using two strips for each day, I have divided each month into four sections, each made up of 7 or 8 days, so 14 or 16 strips.  After fretting a bit about whether I should try foundation piecing and if so how on earth to do it by hand, I realised that freezer paper templates will do the job beautifully.  I'll mark up some freezer paper, cut it into the sections, and then cut off each day's strips as I go.  The sections will be 4" x 12", giving a 48" quilt before borders.  That should be a nice size for a wall hanging, perhaps to go above my bed.

The quilter I got this idea from is Ann Brauer.  She makes beautiful quilts reminiscent of skies and seas, using lots of little stacked strips.  In her case, with machine piecing, she says she sews straight onto the batting, doing it in sections in a form of quilt as you go (QAYG).  I'm borrowing the sections idea, it seems to be enough to make it manageable to piece but not enough to take over and make it look too rigid.  Here is an example of her work, which shows how effective occasional contrasting strips can be.

Ann Brauer, Gentle Dawn

I love the way those deep oranges glow against the blues.

Ann Brauer, Purple Mountains

Ann Brauer, Summer on the Meadow

Looking at these made me realise that if I'm drawing those strips freehand, they don't have to be exact.  I can make the high temp strips taller when the days are shorter, and shorter in the winter when the days are longer.  I think that'll give a better feel for whether the warmer or cooler temperatures are more dominant, giving greater emphasis to the blue end of the colour range in the winter and the golds and reds in the summer.  It'll also add variety, along with the strip height naturally varying due to having either 7 or 8 days in a section.

The next question, of course, is colours.  Most of these quilts are based on a rainbow, often quite bright.  There's a lovely pair of flying geese quilts done by sisters in Alaska and California, where they've used similar colour schemes to produce very different results according to their different climates.  They're glorious, but they're brighter than I think I want in a large wall hanging.

Stacking those linen samples made me realise that a more muted colour scheme could look stunning.  I'm hoping to achieve something reminiscent of the Scottish landscape.  There will be lots of soft blues and greens, probably a few brownish colours on the way to the golds and rusts, and I want to try using lavenders, mauves and greys for the temperatures below freezing.  The "landscape quilts" section I'm building in my Pinterest is quite swoonworthy. Look at these, for example, by the textile artist Rachel Wright.

Rachel Wright, After the Storm

Rachel Wright, Into the Storm

Most of my stash is batiks, and while I think they will largely be too bright, there are plenty which have always been a bit too muted to use with the rest, and I'm eager to get home to them and see how they work together.

The quilt I'm actually working on at my flat is a little wheelchair quilt made from the scraps from R's bedspread, using randomised 3" half-square triangles.  I've already cut about a third of the pieces for that in one day, so it shouldn't take too long to get that part done.

I'll aim to begin the temperature quilt at the start of June, which gives me the next ten days to select fabrics and draw it out on the freezer paper, while also cutting my striped triangles for the wheelchair quilt.  R is away for a conference for the rest of this week, giving me the whole ten days in my flat instead of the usual week.  There will be much revelling in fabric!

Crowfooting tutorial

Crowfooting is my big thing at the moment. It seems to be traditional in some cultures, but very little written about, and the only professional quilter I've found talking about it is Sarah Kaufman, who like me switched to it due to disability, in her case arthritis. She makes amazing log cabin quilts using narrow folded strips, and does rows of crowfooting along the sashing.

Traditionally, crowfooting is mainly used as a replacement for tying that skips the knots and tails. It is also called crow's feet stitching or turkey tracks. The beauty of crowfooting is that you can do it instead of tying, at 4" intervals say, but you can also space your stitches more closely together and create lines of stitching. I haven't yet seen it used particularly creatively, but I think it holds great potential, especially with the vibrant directionality of the stitches.

I use it to replace quilting lines, forming patterns while still being a lot quicker and easier than hand quilting.  You don't need a hoop or frame, no thimble is required, you won't be pricking your fingers, and it is so easy to quilt in all directions without turning the quilt that I have crowfooted an entire bedspread while keeping it on the bed all the time.  Not only was I sitting in bed under the quilt while working on it, but the cat frequently sat on me and the quilt as well.  This is a very disability-friendly way of quilting, even on a huge quilt.  It doesn't feel like supporting much weight, and because there is so little equipment, it's very easy to stop and start according to fatigue levels.

This is a version of fly stitch, which can be done either as a V or as a Y.  You can also do cross stitches, and some people combine both in the same quilt.  Another version, called the hidden or international stitch, has two horizontal stitches, one directly above the other, but I found it surprisingly difficult to sew neatly, and it lacked the movement of the fly stitches.

Thread

I use perle #8, which is thick enough to balance well with the stitch size and also show up nicely.  Although it can be surprisingly inconspicuous if you choose to match the thread to the fabric instead, as I chose to do when requilting my old bedspread.  The 10g balls of thread are ideal, and I have built up a good collection by now.  There are often good deals on sets of Anchor perle #8 threads on eBay and Amazon.  Variegated thread won't show up that well, because of the gap between stitches, so you are better off getting several colours that shade into each other and switching between them every time you start a new thread, if you want that effect.  You need to think about your designs on a bigger scale with crowfooting, right down to shading the threads.

I haven't tried perle #5 yet, but as long as you don't end up with big holes from burying the knot, I think it could look stunning and make a big statement.  Thinner thread such as perle #12 looks a little unbalanced to my taste, considering the size of the stitches.

Needles

If you are using this technique instead of quilting lines, and your stitches are up to 1" apart (mine are 3/4" apart):

First choice: #7 short/cotton darners. Get a mixed pack of #3-#9 and see what you get on with. John James (Colonial Needles), Prym and Bohin make them, that I know of so far.

Second choice: #7 straw/milliners. Again, get a mixed pack of #3-#9 and see what you get on with. When I can afford them, I may try Tulip #7 milliners, as people say Tulip needles are amazing.

Straw needles are virtually identical to short darners, but the eye is a little smaller and harder to thread. I have no difficulty using either a #7 short darner or a # straw. Straw needles may be easier to find.

May work for some: embroidery or sashiko needles.

If you are spacing your stitches further apart than 1", try a mixed pack of long darners, and again the #7 is the first one I'd try. These are like short darners but longer.

If you are using this technique to replace tying a quilt and your stitches will be a few inches apart, buy a pack of doll/sculpture needles, such as the Hemline ones.  I initially did this when crowfooting at 2" intervals, and used the smallest in the Hemline set, which was 4" long. 

Remember that bigger needles leave bigger holes in the fabric, which means more scraping at the hole with your thumbnail after burying the knot, and makes bearding (fibres from the batting creeping out) more likely.  They are easier to thread, but once the eye gets too big, the thread will keep slipping out and will have to be knotted in place.  The Hemline 4" doll needle was the largest I found where the thread didn't slip out. If you really need the needles to be longer, you can tie the thread onto thr needle at the eye.

#7 short darning needles are my current favourite.  They have a nice, flexible feel while being strong enough, a good length, are easy to thread without the thread slipping out while you sew, and feel comfortable in the hand.  I notice that my hands are a lot more relaxed with longer needles like these than they were with between needles, which helps avoid hand pain. So far, the brands I've found selling #7 short darners, also called cotton darners, are John James (sold as Colonial Needles in the US) and Prym.

Be aware that needle sizes are not standardised between brands, so a #9 embroidery needle in one brand could be more like a #7 or #5 in another. Hunt down the sizes if you're having difficulties. The #7 short darners that I adore are 0.69 x 48mm, with a long eye.

How to stitch

I am right-handed, so I hold my needle in my right hand and keep my left hand under the quilt.  You are not stitching against your finger as with hand quilting, but you will be using your left hand to grasp and manipulate the quilt, and to feel whether the needle has come through all three layers or not. 

 1. Tie a knot 1/2" from the end of your thread, looping the thread around twice.  Pull it tight.  This shows the knot before it is pulled tight.

 2. Put the needle into the top a little over 1/2" below where you want to begin your line of stitching, and a little to the right.  You are going to bury the knot underneath what will become your line of stitching.  Bring it out where you will have the left side of your first stitch.

You want to put your needle into the batting, but do not bring it out at the back.  Use the fingers on your left hand to check this from the underside of the fabric.

 3. Pull the thread through, and then bury the knot by popping it in.  I find it easiest to pinch the fabric close to where you are burying the knot with your left hand, then wrap the thread once around the first two fingers of your right hand, and give a sharp tug.  Once the knot is buried, use your thumbnail to scrape over the hole it made, and that should move the thread fibres back so that the hole is no longer visible.  This is possible with batiks, which have a finer weave, but it is harder if you are using a bigger needle.

You bury the knot and then turn around to begin your stitching, and this turn helps anchor the stitching in place.  So does having a decent amount of a tail left buried.

 4. Put your needle into the fabric a bit to the right, between 1/8" and 1/4" away depending on how thick your quilt is and what look you are going for.  This time you are going to push your needle through all the layers of the quilt, and come up below and in the middle, forming a triangle between where the thread is coming out and the two points of the needle.  Again, use your left hand to check that you can feel the needle coming through at the back.

You can now see a row of stitches I did earlier in cream.

5. Pull the thread round so that it comes under your needle, and pull the needle through to make your first stitch.  This is the main point where I check with my left hand from the underside, as I can feel the thread as it moves through better than I can feel the smooth needle alone.

This is the only part of the process where a stitch is being formed on the back of the quilt.  It will look like a single slanted stitch, which I'll show at the end.

 6. Put your needle back in just below the bottom of the V, and push it through the batting but not out to the back.  Bring it up again where you wish to begin your next stitch. You are travelling the needle between the layers.

If you are using crowfooting to replace tying a quilt, this will be several inches away, and this will be where a much longer needle is useful.

If you are using crowfooting to replace lines of quilting, it will be a lot closer.  I found that my natural stitch spacing developed with practice, and that for me it's 3/4" between stitches.

 7. The thread is pulled through, the first stitch is completed, and you are ready to take the second stitch.  Repeat until you are near the end of your thread, or your line of stitching.

 8. To finish a line of stitching, put the needle in just below the bottom of your last stitch, where the thread is shown coming out here.

 9. Pushing the needle between the layers but not through to the back, bring it out again about 1/4" away, going back in the direction of your stitching line.  As when you began your stitching line, you are turning in the opposite direction to help anchor the end of your stitching.

 10. Form a knot just above where the thread comes out of the fabric, using your fingernail to push it down.  Here I am looping the thread to form the knot.  As at the beginning, wrap it around twice.

 11. This shows the knot once it's formed.  Pull it tight.

 12. Put your needle back in the same hole you made when you brought the thread out to make the knot, push it between the layers but not through to the back, and bring it out 1/2" away, angling off to the side.  Angling it this way means that you are pulling the knot slightly to the side under the hole it's going back into, which helps bury it.

 13. Bury the knot with a sharp tug, pinching the fabric with your left hand again.

 14. Snip the thread next to the fabric, as I've just done in this photo.  Rub your thumbnail over it, and  any visible bit of thread will disappear.

15. This shows the back of my sample piece, with the little slanting stitches.  I must confess that they do not come out quite as neatly as the front, and every now and again my needle comes through to the back when it's not meant to and an extra little stitch appears, which will hopefully improve with practice and also when using thicker batting.  Despite slight irregularities, the overall effect is pleasant.





And that's it!  It's simpler than it looks, but I wanted to show every single stage in detail just in case.  I spent a while working out the best way to bury the knot at each end of the thread, without anything extra showing on the back, and had to unpick my earlier stitching due to some knots popping back out.  You definitely need the change in direction and the goodly sized tails when burying your knots.  Once I got this method down, they all stayed put, and the bedspread I crowfooted has been through a wash and tumble dry cycle without any issues.

As well as feeling whether or not the needle is coming through to the back, the main job of your left hand is to hold the fabric in position between your thumb and first finger.  I'll get my partner to take photos of me doing this once I start crowfooting his bedspread.  I used to be one of those people who had to use a quilting frame in order to get decent tension for hand quilting, but for some reason, I had no trouble at all with the tension when crowfooting.

Crowfooting away from yourself is as easy as towards yourself, as you are not loading multiple stitches onto the needle.  As the stitching is directional, you may sometimes find that you want your stitches to face the other way around from the direction you are stitching in, in order to save yourself stopping and restarting the line from somewhere else.  I have found that this works out absolutely fine.  You finish a stitch and then pass the thread underneath it as part of travelling to the next stitch.

 I cut up some distinctly deceased old jeans in order to try out crowfooting on them.  The stitches ended up fairly close together as I didn't have a huge amount of space to play with, but it was invaluable for trying out shapes and combinations of threads.

If you look at the spiral on the top left, I initially tried that with the same amount of spacing between the stitches as between the rows.  Despite gradually changing colour with the threads, it didn't show up well as a spiral.  I went in and put a stitch in between most of the other ones, and the design clicked, though I didn't bother with the outer row, where you can see the original spacing.

This is where I decided that you need a minimum of double the distance between rows as you have between stitches, if you want it to read as lines of quilting rather than randomly placed stitches.  For me, that's 3/4" between stitches and at least 1 1/2" between rows.  Whereas the oranges and reds at the left further down read as a grid, because I didn't follow that rule.  A grid with colour variations, but nevertheless, a grid.

Under that is two attempts at doing the equivalent of a double line of quilting.  Neither turned out very convincing for that purpose, and where I staggered the stitches, it suddenly lives up to its name of crowfooting, also called crow's feet stitching or turkey tracks.  If you want to give the effect of a bird having walked over your quilt, that's how to do it!  I was thinking of the double lines 1/4" apart in Welsh quilting, but I think that as crowfooting has such a strong presence due to the shape of the stitches, a single line of crowfooting is a better replacement.  Lines of crowfooting in different colours would have a stronger effect.

The concentric circles on the left in blue, lime green and white, where I change thread colour every row, look effective to me.  The concentric circles on the right, where I tried changing colour randomly in the middle of rows, are interesting but look muddled at that scale.  They may look better done that way with larger circles and better spacing between rows.

The piece of denim below shows more experimenting with spirals, changing the thread colour every time I finish a thread, and also variegated thread, which was a little disappointing.  Also concentric diamonds, which I considered using for the quilt I've just basted, but decided would be the less interesting option.  I'll be crowfooting that quilt in large spirals of varying sizes.

Upside down basting

Who else quilts in bed? OK, now who else quilts in bed and leaves the quilt on the bed while you're working on it? And has their cat pottering about on it? No? Why not?

Crowfooted coaster, modelled by black cat

These days I am crowfooting quilts rather than hand quilting them. Until I do a tutorial, here is a demonstration of crowfooting on a coaster. (On a cat, on a quilt.)

Crowfooting is much easier and quicker than hand quilting, it doesn't require a frame or hoop, and you don't need to keep turning the quilt in all directions when your stitching line changes angle. So you can do it with very little trouble while staying in bed, turning the quilt around when you get to halfway. I recently crowfooted an old quilt of mine that needed requilting, and it lived on the bed the whole time. That was already quilted, of course, if not densely enough, and bound.  It behaved impeccably throughout.

How to adapt this to a new quilt, I wondered. Because I am also all about staying in bed, whether I like it or not. I've got severe ME/CFS and need to be in bed around 22 hours a day. Being able to quilt in bed means I can do a lot more, be less bored, and be able to gaze at my creative work the rest of the time.

I'm a big fan of herringbone thread basting, but it leaves long threads on the front of the quilt.  They're easily caught in your fingers, and I was worried that the cat would get them caught in her claws.  So I decided to try basting a quilt upside down, putting the top down first, then the batting, then the backing, so that the long threads would end up on the back of the quilt. I did this for a wall hanging first, and found it pleasant to quilt without all those long threads in the way.

While this technique is ideal for someone like me who works on the quilt while it's on the bed, I could also see its being useful if your cat likes to sit on the quilt while you're wrangling it under your sewing machine, or even just if you find the long basting threads annoying.  They do get in the way rather, and they can be visually distracting.

If you shudder at the idea of basting because you have grim memories of crawling around on the floor, don't worry. It can all be done on a tabletop. I snagged an IKEA dining table that can be extended to 220cm/87", but if yours is smaller, I am assured that it can still be done, just in more sections. It may be easier to keep it securely clipped on all sides with a smaller table, too. I've seen various tutorials online of people basting on a tabletop, sometimes with thread basting, sometimes with spray basting, and they use tables of various sizes.


Get yourself a vinyl tablecloth big enough to cover the whole table. They're cheap. This is so that you don't scratch your table to buggery when basting, which is what I did to my last table. I got a white tablecloth, which helps with general visibility.  Put this over the table, and if there are big creases that are annoying you, they should improve if weighted down for a while.  Mine was reasonably creased when I basted this weekend and it didn't cause a problem, it all still lay flat.

The other thing you will need to buy in advance is a box of binder/bulldog clips that are big enough to grip the table plus the quilt layers.

If your batting and/or backing aren't quite square, and I had an exciting curve on my backing, square them up before you start, because otherwise it will be a nightmare getting things centred.  I, erm, cut my backing piece before I figured out the borders and didn't leave much in the way of excess.  You don't need much excess for crowfooting, it seems the least likely method to cause shifting and it's not like you need space for a frame or hoop, but I really did cut it fine there.  A few inches all the way around should be sufficient.

Quilt top next to metre ruler

Prepare your quilt top in the usual way, and mark the centres of all the sides with a safety pin.  Put a safety pin in the very centre of the quilt, and put all your safety pins in from the top.  You do not want to end up with a safety pin inside your quilt! Here the quilt top is upside down, so you can only see the underside of the safety pin.

Lay the quilt top out on your table, top side down, and centre it, checking both sides as well as the middle.  I used both my tape measure and my metre long ruler for this.  I had quilt hanging down on both sides, not quite enough to reach the floor.  (It made a fantastic kitty fort overnight.)

Quilt top on table with binder clips on

Put binder clips on to hold your quilt down, starting from the middle on each side.  My quilt is slightly shorter than the full length of the table, so I only clipped two sides rather than all four.  I think this was enough to secure it, but I'm curious as to how it would have behaved if I had extended the table less and clipped down four sides, or alternatively used masking tape on the open sides.  I used five clips for each side of an 80" quilt.

This is a place where you notice a difference from basting the usual way around with your quilt top on top.  When smoothing the quilt out to make sure it's nicely taut, without being stretched, this is much easier when you don't have your seam allowances on top.  I didn't really smooth it, just pulled gently, made sure all my safety pins were centred including the one in the middle of the quilt, and both my partner and I checked by eye that the quilt was lying well.

I didn't see the quilt top again until the basting was all over, and then I spent the rest of the evening fretting that it might not have been basted quite as flat as it usually was.  I still can't quite tell, although it must be said that after basting a huge quilt over three days with severe ME/CFS, I was exhausted and snappish and not in the best place to judge.  (It won't take three days if you're healthy, I had to do very small amounts at a time and keep resting in between.)

It's now sitting on my bed, as you'll see at the end of the post, and it looks fine.  If there is a small difference, crowfooting is forgiving enough that it won't show up, but machine quilting might not be.  I've never ended up with any puckers or shifts when quilting, so I'm only guessing there.  Clipping the quilt down on all four sides, or using masking tape for the open sides, remains an option if you are concerned about this.  So does starching the top, which I'm guessing would help.  People make reversible quilts and presumably deal with this issue when they do.  It's worth knowing that I am so picky about accuracy that I considered titling this blog The Persnickety Quilter, and my standards for basting are high.

Anyway, back to the basting.  When preparing your batting, you will also have marked the centres.  I used a red washable pen for this, one of the Crayola ones, and only marked the centres of the edges, though I realised halfway through basting that I should have marked the middle as well.  It didn't seem to cause a problem, but I'll mark the middle next time, may as well.  Put on your batting, get it centred, and peer down the overhanging sides to see if it's lining up nicely there.  You may need to temporarily remove the binder clips to check that.  Once it looks well lined up, smooth it all down, starting from the centre of your table and smoothing outwards.  Take off the binder clips and replace them so that they are now on top of the batting and the top.

Backing layered over batting

Do the same with your backing, which you have marked up with safety pins for the centres, and make sure your safety pins are on the top. You should be able to feel the middle safety pin from the quilt top through your layers, so that's the first thing to get aligned, and then you can match it to your top and batting around the edges as well.  Here you can see the red Crayola pen mark on the batting, next to the safety pin on my backing.  My backing ended up a bit smaller than my batting, due to having cut the backing a bit small overall, but I managed to get it lined up so that the backing covered the top properly.

Check along your centres and down your overhanging sides, smooth out the backing over the table, and take out the binder clips and reposition them on top.  You now have your quilt layered and clipped firmly into place.

The next job is the thread basting.  At this point I will hand you over to the famous basting tutorial by Sharon Schamber, which is how we all learned herringbone thread basting.  It's a technique used in tailoring and does a great job of staying put and holding your layers together.  Where I diverge from Sharon is that she wraps her layers around boards and unrolls them as she goes, whereas I clip them to the table instead.  The stitching technique is the same, however.  I use a thin crochet thread, thinner than perle #8 but thicker than piecing thread, and I think the needle is a #9 embroidery needle.

Centre section of quilt fully basted

My dining table is pretty wide, so I keep chairs on both sides of the table to sit on while basting, and move to the other side after covering half the top.  I start in the middle, baste my way out to one end of the table, go back to the middle, baste to the other end, then go around to the other side of the table and cover that side, so that I've done it in four sections.

This is the part of basting that I love.  It's easy sewing, it goes fast, and it's peaceful.  It took me about an hour to cover that huge dining table.

Do a separate line of stitching when you get to the edge of the quilt, and put your stitches closer together. This is so that you can rip out your basting stitches once you've quilted over that section, but still have a firm line of basting all the way around the edge.  The edge basting stitches are the last to come out, just before trimming and binding.

When you have done this section, do the rest of the quilt in sections.  Undo your clips and pull the quilt along so that you have the next fresh piece of quilt to do, making sure that you leave a bit of basted quilt on top of the table so that there aren't any uneven bits in between.  If your quilt comes to three sections in total, as mine did, line up the long edge of the quilt top right next to the table, so that you are putting your binder clips over the excess batting and backing to keep it in place, but you can still baste it right up to the edge of your quilt top.  Otherwise, do it a bit at a time until you get to the outside sections, and then line the quilt top up at the edge.

Cat standing on the ironing board

Congratulations, you have now thread basted your quilt upside down!  Have a picture of my cat climbing on the ironing board while we were dealing with the batting as a reward.

If you want to keep your quilt on the bed while you quilt it, we now proceed to covering the edges.  I felt safe in doing this because I've never had a quilt shift while quilting it.  From what I gather, this is something that happens with machine quilters, due to nefarious activities of various feet or something.  (I only have a dim idea of how sewing machines work.)

Hand quilting is far less likely to shift, and from my experience so far, crowfooting is not going to budge.  You're not sewing continuous lines, you are putting in individual stitches with space in between, coming at them from above rather than pushing anything to the side.  I did consider binding straight after basting, but just in case there's a tiny bit of shifting near the edge, I compromised with putting on temporary binding instead, and here is how I did it.

Trim your batting and backing to 1/2" beyond the edge of your quilt top.  This was the last job I did with the dining table extended, not that it really needed to be.  I couldn't be bothered to tidy my sewing desk enough to lug nigh on seven feet square of quilt onto it and use the rotary cutter on my cutting mat, so I marked it up with pen on the dining table and then cut it with scissors.  I expected that to be hard on my hands, but actually it was fine.

For the next stage, I plonked the quilt on the bed and gratefully collapsed into bed to sew on the temporary binding there, which I managed while lying down.  I had previously bought 9m of cotton lace ribbon in navy.  I was aiming for 2" wide, but the only one I managed to find at a reasonable price on Etsy was slightly under at 45mm wide.  It was OK, but it would have been slightly easier at 2"/50mm.  The point of cotton lace is that it has nice big holes you can stitch through, so that you don't have to sew through any more layers of fabric than are already on the quilt.  Make sure the lace has straight edges on both sides.  If you're doing this by machine, you could probably use pretty much anything the right width as edging, even strips of fabric with the edges turned underneath.  Make sure it's long enough to go all the way around the quilt with a bit extra.

Lace ribbon in the process of being sewn on as temporary binding

Fold your lace ribbon over the edge of the quilt.  It should be enough to cover the exposed batting and come to just over the edge of your top, and that's where you'll be stitching.  I used those cheapie clips that are a knockoff of Clover Wonder Clips to clip the lace in place, and used the holes in the lace as a guide for where to sew.

Pick a thread that will stand out against the lace, so that it'll be easy to unpick later.  I used a perle #8 thread, though I could have used the thinner crochet thread I used for basting as well.  A #7 straw/milliner needle worked best, and then I simply did a running stitch, with backstitches at the start and end of each thread.  Make sure that you catch the lace on the back with each stitch as well.  The lace folded over easily to mitre at the corners, and if you're someone who cannot get the hang of mitring corners, you can cut it and start a new piece, making sure to fold the edge of the lace under so there are no raw edges.  I did that at the end.  You can see in the photo that I had the quilt upside down while doing this, with the long basting threads showing (the cat was safely sunbathing in the other room at the time), and turned up the edges of the quilt to work on.

Basted quilt laid out on my bed

And there you have it!  One basted quilt laid out on my bed, where it's spending a few days before being taken to my partner's for quilting.  We spend alternate weeks at each other's flats, and I piece at my flat and quilt at his.  We do have to be careful when pushing the quilt around, as once you flip it over you see the long threads on the underside which are easily caught in fingers, but we're getting the hand of it.  From the top, it's all neat, with only the small basting stitches showing, and the cat has been all over it by now without catching anything in her claws.

This didn't occur to me when designing it, but I've sewn a series of squares for her to sit in, as cats are known to do.  Oddly enough, the big red one is around where she sleeps at night on my partner's ankles, and the nearly as big blue one is around where she curls up on me during the day.  When we play board games and you have to pick a colour for your pieces, he always plays red and I play blue.  Evidently it's fated.  My partner keeps making happy noises whenever he sees it, as it's the first quilt I've made him and he's thrilled to bits.

First post

Welcome! I'm a disabled quilter living in Scotland, and I sew everything by hand. There are a number of new techniques I'm interested in exploring, and I'll write tutorials for them where I can.