Poor neglected hexie quilt

Last fall I was busy hand piecing a quilt of black and beige hexies, and documenting my progress on this blog. Finally a bit of progress.  The piecing was finished, several weeks ago, and today I moved on to basting the quilt, preparatory to machine quilting it.

Fortunately, I own a basic, old fashioned quilting frame.  My father made it for me many years ago, and it isn't in great shape.  The last time it was actually used to hand quilt  was probably in the 1970's.  But over the years I've taken to basting larger pieces on it.  Normally this is done, outside in the garage, during the summer. I am a real fan of spray basting, and for that, one needs good ventilation.  Not too practical when the temperature, with windchill is -39C. 

So, before Christmas, knowing that this was coming up, and that there was a second quilt needing the same thing, we brought the frame into the house. Today we set it up, and I started pin basting, as my husband believes there is a respiratory hazard with spray basting in the house and I agree.

Here is an end view of the frame.  It's based on a type of ratchet system, where the bars are held in place with two penny nails, put through the bar and into a hole drilled in the end piece.

The backing is then pinned to pieces of denim that are stapled along the length of  the bars.  This is then tightly rolled onto one of the bars.  The batting and quilt top are gently laid on top of this with one end just inside the edge of the rolled backing. As one works, the basted edge is gradually rolled onto the bar.

In this picture, I would be sitting at the back (top of the picture), and start working in the middle of then quilt, and then to each side, as I pin.  As I work, the basted quilt is rolled onto the bar in front of me. I store my pins open, so as to reduce stress on fingers, and then close them, once into the quilt, with a grapefruit spoon--one of my very favourite quilting tools!

As you can see, in this quilt, I chose to pin every second vertical row of hexies.  I try to pin so that no unpinned area is larger than my very small closed fist--about every four inches.

The whole job, putting up the frame, and pinning a 45 by 65 inch quilt took about 2 1/2 hours.

I plan to link this with Nina-Marie Sayre's Off the Wall Friday, and The Needle and Thread network.