Basting Update and Success!

This isn’t a brand-new tutorial regarding basting, but is an update and success story regarding an earlier basting tutorial.

A few years ago, I gave glue basting a try and wrote up a basting tutorial. I still stand by that tutorial.

The quilts I’m sharing today all use glue basting, have perfectly smooth backings and have one little additional secret ingredient from the original glue basting tutorial.

I added water!

Just a Couple Drops of Water

I added a tiny bit of water to my Elmers glue and found that it spreads more evenly, uses less glue over all, and has improved my basting skill so that quilting on my regular sewing machine is running even more smoothly than before.

Recent Quilts

I released this new Falling Stars Quilt Pattern a few weeks ago. While I still haven’t basted or quilted the Christmas version, here are a couple of photos of the Citrus version.

You can see on the quilt top that I used my tried and true Straight Line Quilting following the seams and quilting ¼” from each side of the seams.

The back of the quilt, with flannel backing, looks like this.

Smooth, straight lines and no wrinkles or puckering in the fabric.

I’ve done more and more quilts with one horizontal quilting recently.

This brightly colored baby quilt that came from the 16-Patch Quilt Block Tutorial is a good example of that.

The quilting lines are even better defined here.

I used a scrappy, pieced backing for this quilt and love the texture from the close together horizontal quilting lines.

I also used horizontal quilting on this very scrappy 4-Patch quilt.

This quilt might be my most favorite backing ever! And check out those lines of straight quilting!

For the 2023 Quiltville Mystery, I used up tons of scrappy blue flannels for the backing. I used a blue variegated thread (from light to navy blues) for quilting and love how it turned out.