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.