Re: Quilting a large piece....have ??

On Mar 25, 10:19 pm, "KT in Mich" wrote:

Hi, I've been lurking trying to learn from you and I sure have! New to this > fabulous craft but suspect it's going to get waaaay out of hand. Am alrea dy > thinking about room additions to hold everything. Anyway, I'd really l ike > to tackle something big someday and the biggest obstacle I see to this is > where do I do the process of sandwiching the quilt so that it is nice and > smooth when I go to do the actual quilting? I mean, like what do you d o > when the quilt is larger than any table you have to lay it out on? I'm > pretty sure I'm not alone when I say there is no way I can get down on th e > floor to work on it --- I'd never be able to get back up! LOL, but true. Do > you put a bunch of folding tables together? Buy a ping pong table whic h is > still probably too narrow for a king size spread? Rent a hall? I reall y > want to be able to do this myself and not have to hire it out. Is ther e a > way to sandwich the quilt in parts, like do one side and have the other s ide > rolled up? Will that work? Gosh, I've looked at many different site s and I > can't come up with an answer. Hope some of you can give me some ideas. Am > just finishing up a beginner lap quilt class and really enjoy this! > > Kathy in Michigan

Hi Kathy - welcome! I'm with Leslie on this one and am relatively new (6-8 yrs) to the art. I'm also short so have a hard time reaching across multiple tables. I have one of the cutting/craft tables that JoAnn Fabric sells that the 2 sides fold down (although it seems it's only Christmas time that it's folded up!) I lay out the backing, smooth, clip w/binder clips; lay out the batting, smooth, check for even distribution, reposition the binder clips on both layers and then repeat for the quilt top. It's a lot of circling the table and re- distributing but once you get everything lined up for even distribution and securely clipped then pinned or thread basted, it's not so bad. One thing to keep in mind - if you're pin-basting, that puppy gets HEAVY if you're doing a large (queen/king) quilt! Thread basting makes the piece much lighter to ultimately quilt either by machine or hand. In either case, I usually put pins or threads about a hand-width apart. Another suggestion for locations to do this would be your local firehouse - especially if they are volunteer versus a paid fire company. My DH and I are both active with ours so I frequently use their banquet hall particularly for laying out the entire quilt as I don't have either enough wall or floor space to get the rows of a large quilt flat to get a sense of what things actually look like! Plus, the Beasty Girl (chocolate lab) likes to help entirely too much!

Good luck with your projects!

Kim in rainy NJ headed to the Lancaster (PA) Quilt show in a couple of hours