Thanks, Fellow Quilters---that's what I kind of thought, but was hoping to hear that someone did it and it worked fine.
The hand quilting instructor advised us to actually hand-baste with needle and thread. Guess I'll stick with her suggestion. I'm going to start with a small lap quilt, so the basting shouldn't be so terrible. (Learned a tip from her: for basting, use bobbins with just little quantities of thread left to use them up and not waste thread from the spool. )