Originally Posted by brainless
I recently read some information on 505 basting spray. It said that it worked really well for layering your quilt. Has anybody used this and how do they like it?
What do you use to layer your quilts? Do you use safety pins, baste with thread, or use those quilt guns?
I have used all of these methods. My favorite is spray basting, although I admit I haven't done it on a large quilt yet. It was really, really fast and therefore easy on my back for the small quilts I did. The layers stayed sandwiched for a very long time; never had any problem with separation. I did not pin or baste with thread either. The biggest difficulty with the gun was creating the space required underneath the quilt sandwich because at the time I was clamping the layers to a large table (a la Harriet Hargrave, I think?).
Prior to discovering spray basting, my favorite method was the quilt gun. If you purchase one of these, be sure to buy the better quality gun that uses the finer plastic darts. I don't know if they still make them, but some of the earlier guns were cheaper, used thicker darts, and had a tendency to jam. My gun never jammed on me and never left big holes in my fabrics. (Guns may not be suitable for batiks and heavier cotton broadcloth types of fabric; these are more tightly woven than regular quilting cottons, and I have heard of guns leaving holes in this type of fabric. You would definitely want to test before using a gun on these.)
Before I had the gun, I pin-basted the quilts I intended to machine quilt and thread-basted the quilts I wanted to hand quilt. To do these quilts, I mounted them on my homemade frame. This is simply 4 2x4s to which I stapled doubled-over fabric leaders and marked measurements from the center out to each side. I used C-clamps to fasten the 4 wooden pieces to each other, propping the ends on kitchen chairs. I pinned the backing to the leaders first, matching middles, and created my sandwich from there. I actually liked this system, but it was time-consuming because of the rolling and re-pinning needed for a bed-sized quilt, and ultimately it became too much for my back. It worked best for small quilts. Twin-sized quilts had a tendency to sag in the middle.