I cannot pass a fabric store, especially one of the touristy kind where they lure you in with gorgeous stuff in the window and half an hour later you walk out with $100 worth of product that you tell yourself you will sew into a quilt even though you haven’t been involved in quilting since you were in high school.

OK. That was last June in Ashland Oregon at Sew Creative. Now here we are in January and I am resolved to start quilting. It’s a single fabric quilt, not something I have to piece together so I can jump right into layering the front and back with the cotton batting middle. Lacking a quilting frame, this is not the easiest task but I found a wonderful quilter, Sharon Schamber whose video tutorial walks you through a clear way to combine the layers and baste them in place. I say “clear,” but do not for a minute think “easy.” It involves wrapping the two pieces of fabric around flat straight 3-inch boards to reduce wrinkling. You slip the cotton between them and then baste in manageable sections.

The good news is that I have a large enough dining room table to lay this queen-sized quilt project out on (wrapped around the boards). The other good news (in the lemonade-out-of-lemons category) is that since the pandemic continues with us, I won’t mind commandeering the dining room table for a while. The first photo shows the fabric wrapped on the boards and the first section rolled out for basting. The next photo shows that first section basted.

The basting will hold the three layers together so that I can hand quilt using a hoop. In my project completion fantasy it will be gorgeous. I’m blogging my progress so that I will have a hope of actually making progress.