I just did my basting and used the sharon shamborg way(sp). It was a little frustrating because the string was always getting caught on the cover for my feed dogs. I have seen some pictures on here of some quilts and seen that some of you use safety pins instead. is there an advantage to this? I would think starting out it was nice not to have to stop all the time to take them out and restart since my restarting isnt that great yet. But maybe i could just go around them since i was stippling anyways. Are there any other ways you might recommend than the basting with string?