I've learned both ways from my LAQ friend. With my first quilt, she taught me leader everything, then baste both horizontally and vertically the entire quilt before winding it back to the top and start quilting. From the 2nd quilt on, we just leader the back of the quilt and float both the batting and the top. It think it's important to note that we baste the entire quilt with large 1 inch stitches before we begin quilting, so there are not surprises when we get to the bottom of the quilt.