The Flimsy's connected to the batting. The Batting's connected to the back...

Sandwich day!!  This is always both a good and a bad day.  Good because it means I've got a quilt top aka a flimsy and a quilt bottom completely sewn!  Woo hoo!!  Bad because it means I've got to baste them together somehow...The Mister was quite confused when I told him I had to go to the store to buy some basting spray.  "Are you making a turkey?"  He asked.

Nope.  Basting means to hold your 3 layers of quilt together somehow. I used Dritz Quilting Spray Adhesive to hold my layers together.  Instead of pinning or stitching the layers together I am using science!  I hope the science works.  Because quite frankly, this is a very large quilt and I am not machine sewing it, I am hand quilting...but it does say on the bottle that it can be used for hand quilting....I just hope all the layers stay together.  I did pin it a bit.  I didn't trust the spray completely as I've never used it before.  We'll see how it goes.

To start out, I used This Tutorial to give me the basics on what I need to do.  I watched a couple of You Tubes as well...but I found this tutorial was the best way for me to go about things.  She's very thorough.  As you can see from the picture above, you need something kind of heavy to hold the batting in place.  I chose Quart jars of tomatoes.  They were handy and I had four of them.  She recommends heavy weights, but this is what I had.  It worked.  I've tried tape before and found it seriously lacking.  It pulled up too easily and frayed my material and just didn't hold properly.  The tomatoes...were awesome!

She also gives what I think are completely great tips.  Like using safety pins, outline your corners so you know exactly where the top of your quilt lies.  This is especially useful if you have a pieced back and want it to not be wonky.

Here it is!!  All ready to be spray basted down and looking lovely!  If I do say so myself.

The back.  Can I just say two things about the back.  I had so much fun sewing it!  I had an extra block left over and I knew I wanted to incorporate it into the back somehow.  I also wanted to use fabrics that I had used in my front blocks.  I just went with the flow and did what felt right.  I didn't have any pre-conceived notions about how I wanted it to look besides the fabric I wanted to use and so it was just pure fun sewing.  I had to make adjustments with the fabric on the fly to fit the size and it was a good time getting everything to work together.  Yay! 

Fun comes to a screeching halt... I apparently didn't measure properly and so when I was ready to baste everything together...low and behold my back was about 7 inches too short.  So that meant I had to haul it back to the sewing room and add more to it.  That was not pure fun sewing.  That was a drag.  When I'm ready to do something I WANT TO DO IT NOW!!!!  zero patience people.

But it's all worked out I suppose and I am off and quilting.  The spray baste is holding up so far...I'll keep you posted on how it's working.

Gratuitous I got a cute kid pic of the Day

My Young have a serious problem after they go swimming.  Their hair goes weird.  It's hard to describe. It gets kind of dry and crunchy and very very tangled.  So, I figured the only thing to do was get them swim caps.  My Oldest likes hers.  My Youngest doesn't.  Oh well.  I'll keep trying things.

Thanks for reading all!

Heather