Originally Posted by butterflywing
first, we'll get the 'wonderful' part out of the way. we all know you're wonderful. i might be your biggest fan, as you know. i love your work like crazy and am not ashamed to say i am envious of your talent. :-(
now tell me this: on picture #024, do i see a zipper? with a quilt basted on by gun? please tell me what that's all about. i keep reading about leaders that zip on and off. is this it? why?
I can answer part of your question. Yes those are zippered leaders. They are nice to have. When you pin your quilt top and backing to these leaders on your poles you are able to remove the quilts easily by unzipping them if you want to check the backing for tension problems with your stitches. Or if you need to remove some stitches you can easily unzip the quilt from the leaders, remove the bad stitches and zip the quilt back onto the leader so you can finish quilting it. You can also load your quilt onto the removed from leaders zippered part, sitting down. Some people have a hard time loading a quilt standing up for a long period of time, so this helps those that can't.
As far as using the basting gun, I can't answer that question.