A Basting Party / Beauties Pageant 103

Whenever I have more than one quilt to baste, I like to hold what I call a “basting party,” but really, it’s no party at all. It involves moving the living room furniture, rolling up an area rug, cleaning the hardwood, and crawling around on the floor armed with a can of 505 basting spray. 

Two inhabitants of my house are seriously inconvenienced by this process. Rose, our furry family member, expects daily naps on the living room couch and regular sewing sessions in the adjacent dining room. When a quilty creation is on the floor, she is not invited into these rooms and instead snoozes in the kitchen smack up against the door to the dining room, as if to say, “If I can’t come in these rooms, Mom, you cannot come out.”

Then there’s my younger son, who has taken up residence in a corner of the living room with his stuffed animals, trains, books, and other assorted treasures. I call this spot his “office.” He is a creature of habit, and he unrolled the rug more than once, an attempt to get things back to normal. Once I heard, “Woo hoo! I did it!”—a sign of triumph that he had successfully moved an armchair back to its rightful spot. 

See what I mean? Basting is no party!

Despite these obstacles, I successfully spray-basted two projects, my two final Christmas quilts for 2020. The first is my second Merrily quilt, by Gingiber, shown at the top of the posted and below. (See my original Merrily quilt here.) I had initially slated this quilt for getting an edge-to-edge pantograph at the longarmer’s, but I’ve since decided an all-over crosshatch by me would do the trick.

When I posted my original Merrily, a no-reply blogger asked about obtaining the requisite panel. If that was you and you didn’t see my reply on the post, Lark Cottons still has multiple panels in stock. (The site is also offering 20% off on selected manufacturers through November 4. Just sayin’. I love Lark because all yardage is available as fat quarters.)

The second project is Camille Roskelley’s Norway pattern. This quilt, too, was supposed to go to a longarmer—at 78 inches squares, it’s a large quilt to put through the 9-inch throat of my semi-industrial Janome—but I’m quilting it myself now. It’s actually on the machine already. I’ve started quilting diagonal lines, sewn from the center outward, every 3 inches. There are a thousand threads to bury with this approach; I’m OK with that. I’m not sure what I’ll do after the diagonal lines are complete, but I find them rather forgiving. It’s easier to spot wobbles on horizontal and vertical lines of quilting, I think. I may quilt diagonal lines in the opposite direction, creating a true crosshatch. We’ll see.

The skies have been gray for days (hence the rather horrid pictures!), and the snow is now falling. All of us here at From Bolt to Beauty world headquarters have a sore throat and a case of the sniffles. You know who wants to hang out with people with simple colds during a pandemic? No one! So it’s a weekend at home quilting for me.

What are you all up to this weekend? Does your plan sound like mine? 

By the way, my apologies for the confusion over last week’s giveaway. I didn’t pick a random winner; it was a first come, first served kind of situation. Pamela was the first to call dibs on the notions, so they’re off in the mail to her. : )

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