Basting So It Holds Still
Sandwich is made. Top, batting, backing, stacked and smoothed on the table or floor. Now we hold that thing together before you put a single quilting stitch in it, or it'll shift on you and you'll end up with puckers and drag lines you can't fix later.
This is basting. Not glamorous. The part nobody shows you in the pretty pictures. Skip it or rush it and you'll be mad at yourself for the next three weeks quilting a lump instead of a flat quilt.
What basting actually does
Basting is a temporary hold. Safety pins or big loose stitches, either one, just enough to keep all three layers from sliding around while you work. You take it out later. It's not part of the finished quilt. It's scaffolding.
I use safety pins for anything bigger than a table runner, thread basting for small stuff I can finish quick. Your call. Start with pins. Easier to fix a mistake, and you don't have a needle full of thread to lose track of.
Getting the layers flat before you pin
Lay your backing down first, wrong side up, and tape or clip the corners so it can't creep. Floor works fine if your table's not big enough. I've basted plenty of quilts on my own floor with Henry crawling around the edges like a very small inspector.
Batting next, smoothed out, not stretched. Stretching batting is like shoving your iron around instead of pressing. You're pulling everything off grain and it'll show later as puckers. Lay it down, pat it flat with your hands, don't yank the edges.
Top last, right side up, centered. Smooth from the middle out toward the edges, like you're pushing wrinkles out of a bedsheet. Check your corners are square to the backing before you pin anything.
Pinning it down
Start in the middle and work out toward the edges. Every 4 to 6 inches, safety pin through all three layers. Curved safety pins made for quilting are worth the money. Regular ones make you fight the fabric to close them and you'll bend a few before you're done. This is one of those spend-$10-once things. I'll push on it.
Go in rows, or in a grid, whatever gets you even coverage. Don't skip corners and edges just because they seem less important. They'll ripple just as easy as the middle.
And here's the plain part: pins are sharp, and so is anything with a point on that table. I don't hover much in this class, but I will always mention this once. Keep your fingers clear when you're closing them, and keep little kids away from a basting table entirely.
I mean that from experience. Maddox, when he was about six, "helped" me once by getting into my good rotary cutter while my strips were sitting there measured out and ready. I sat him down and explained, calm as I could manage, that the cutter's not a toy and neither is anything else on that table. Gave him dull scissors and some scrap instead, and he made his own little "quilt" that's still tacked up on his wall. Kids can be around the work. They just can't be around the sharp stuff unsupervised. Full stop.
Checking your work
Once you're pinned, flip the whole thing over and look at the back. Any wrinkles, any spots where the backing's bunched up? Catch it now. Start quilting through it and you're stuck with whatever's underneath.
Run your hand across the top too. It should feel flat and a little puffy from the batting, not lumpy in spots. Lumpy usually means the batting shifted or wasn't smoothed out enough before you pinned.
Don't overdo the fussing
I've seen people spend a stupid amount of time getting every single pin perfectly even, like they're gridding a garden. Don't spend twenty minutes on that. It won't matter once it's quilted. What matters is that nothing can slide more than an inch or so before it hits a pin. Get that, and move on.
Before next time
Get your own sandwich basted before our next session so we can start quilting stitches on it together. Pin it generously. You can always take pins out as you go, but you can't add hold back in once things have shifted.