Kathy left the comment/questions below on a blog post so I thought I’d just repost it here and see if I can answer her questions.
I love reading your posts and seeing your quilts. I’m fairly new to quilting and wondered if you could comment on how you sandwich/sew/handle quilting such big quilts. I’ve only tried spray glue on throws or smaller things thus far. I’m also curious if you have a favorite free motion quilting instructor’s name/website/class for someone who has only used a walking foot/stitched in the ditch so far. I appreciate any tips you have if I’m not asking for too many questions or taking too much of your time.
First – no you’re not taking too much of my time and I’m happy to answer questions if I can. :-) Of course, this is what works for me – there are many ways to do things and everyone had their own preferred method or needs to figure out what works for them.
I’m a self-taught quilter, from before there were internet videos/tutorials of all kinds of techniques available to watch. The local PBS station and books were my teachers. Today it is so much easier to find a video to watch to see step by step how to do something.
As to sandwiching and quilting large quilts – it’s all just more time consuming due to the larger size but I don’t know that I really do anything different on a small wall hanging versus a large quilt with one exception. I do occasionally spray baste small wall hangings or table runners but I pin baste with safety pins anything larger in size.
I have a banquet table that is my sewing table. Black binder clips (from the office supply store) are my best friends when layering a quilt.
If you click on the images above they should open up larger. The first is my backing fabric wrong side up binder clipped to the table. I generally start at one edge on smaller projects and just let the excess hang over the other edge. If it’s a large quilt, I generally clip the center of the backing centered on the table and work from the center out.
The quilt I’m pinning in the photos is a lap quilt so I’m just working from one side across the width to the other. After clipping the backing place – repeat the process with the batting removing each binder clip one by one, smoothing batting into place and reclipping it. Then repeat this step a third time, adding the quilt top and smoothing and clipping it in place. That’s what is show in the top three photos. The bottom two are just my finished quilting (I meandered this one) and backing fabric which I love and has been in the stash forever.
If my quilt is longer/wider than my table – after I pin baste the area on the table top, I unclip it and slide it over to the next section, smooth and clip it all down again and pin the next section and repeat until it’s all done. If you’ve never pin basted a quilt (or you can thread baste it too) there are many videos of how to learn to do that too.
This one wasn’t a huge quilt but it just takes more wrestling with your quilt when you are working on a larger one to get the area where you want to quilt laying flat and smooth, I sort of puddle the rest of the quilt around the area where I’m working so it’s not sliding off the other edge of the table causing drag (which will at the very least distort stitches and more importantly can break needles). When I started quilting, many books said to roll the part of the quilt under your machine bed — for me that simply makes it much harder to deal with. You have this long roll that has a mind of it’s own, weighs down the quilt etc. I much prefer to “quilt in a puddle” with the rest of the quilt outside the area my hands are in just loosely puddled up.
There simply is a “just a lot more” needed for a larger quilt versus a smaller one — a lot more moving sections about to pin baste the entire thing, a lot more maneuvering of the quilt sandwich to get it flat where you want to quilt it and keep the rest around that area from causing drag on where you are quilting, a lot more moving, rearranging, smoothing — but you just take your time, do one area at a time, move on to the next and above all relax. I find it interesting when I read comments from quilters that they can’t make a large and enjoy the process since it’s not a race to the finish.
I don find it funny when I read comments from a quilter that they can’t make a large quilt because they can’t quilt it on their machine — perhaps “they” can’t but many of us can.<img src="https://s0.wp.com/wp-content/mu-plugins/wpcom-smileys/twemoji/2/72x72/1f642.png" alt="