Some Assembly Required

Crawling all over a quilt on the floor to pin baste the layers together is getting very old, and also hard on the knees.  Since I have had my old quilting frame still sitting in a box in the garage, I decided it would be a good thing to set it up in the new studio, even if I only used it for quilt basting.

I had bags of the small parts, but it had been put away long enough that I thought I'd lost the instructions, and began laying out the piees on the floor, trying to figure out the best way to begin, and also wondering why two of the bolts were marked with black X's.  Well, what do you know, good packing paid off, and I found the instructions on the machine table, just under the canvas that is used to pin or sew the quilt tops and backs to!   That made the assembly easier:-)

You begin building the frame upside down on the floor,

and then turn it right side up, to finish the assembly. 

The quilt top on the floor was folded in half, temporarily, just so I could measure it for batting and backing, and then all tree were pin basted to the canvas leaders, which were attached to the bars with velcro.  I did have to do a little fiddling, since my leaders were shorter than the quilt, but between now and the next quilt, I plan to purchase and prepare new ones that will be the width of the frame (well, at least set up at this width, I'm also going to need even longer ones that will be used when the frame is extended to king size, which I'm going to need to do when I'm ready to baste my new bed quilt tops).

Once the quilt was on the frame, pin basting went quickly, which was great, because I didn't have much time to get it done!

In case you noticed the machine in the frame, and were wondering why I didn't just machine baste the layers, well, there are really two reasons for that.  The first reason, is that my old Bernina isn't meant for use in a table, and I was just going to give it a shot, which I did, but quickly gave up, when I decided I didn't have any more time to spend.  I do have a newer Bernina at home, that has a start / stop button, and I'm planning to try it out in the frame next time.  The other reason was that I didn't happen to have any water soluble thread, which I was hoping to use, so that I could just run a few rows of quilting, and end up with a basted quilt, which I could just quilt and then wash the basting out, instead of needing to stop, clip, and remove the basting as I quilted.  Well, it's something new to try on another quilt.