I took a quilting class about 20 years ago, and we used fine sandpaper to stabilize the fabric for accurate tracing of a template. So we laid the sandpaper down, gritty side up, then laid the fabric on it, laid the plastic template down on the fabric, and traced the template. Then we drew our quarter-inch around the pattern, picked up the fabric (minus the sandpaper) and (using scissors) cut out along the line where our quarter inch mark had been made. The line that we had traced around the original template was our stitching line. We were quilting by hand in that class.