Basting is defined as:

“The act of moistening food while cooking, especially with stock or pan juices.”

Oops! Wrong kind of basting!

The kind of basting we do in machine embroidery and quilting is:

“Sewing with long, loose stitches to hold material in place until the final sewing.”

Basting is important for both machine embroidery and quilting.

When you’re making a quilt, most people are familiar with the concept of basting the layers of the quilt together (backing + batting + quilt top). For a small quilt, you might baste the layers together using long, loose stitches. For a larger quilt, most people use safety pins. I prefer to use long straight pins. Even quilts quilted using a long arm machine are basted, ensuring that the layers don’t shift when the quilt is being wound and unwound on the rollers.

For machine embroidery, I like to float my background fabric on top of a piece of stabilizer which is in the hoop. It’s then very important to baste the background fabric to the stabilizer in the hoop so that the fabric doesn’t shift around. Another benefit to this basting is that it stops the background fabric from drawing in while the embroidery is stitching, thus eliminating puckers.

The majority of design from Sarah Vedeler Designs have a basting stitch built into the design: you can be sure that your background fabric will stay in place and you won’t get any puckers during stitching.

Some embroidery machines have a built in option to add a basting line around a design. If you’re using a design that doesn’t include this basting line, adding it has the potential to significantly improve your finished result.

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What I love about this collection… There are two versions of most of the designs: In one version, the plates have outline stitches only and there are so many possibilities for creating kaleidoscopes out of the plates by fussy cutting gorgeous prints. In the other version, solid fabrics can be brought alive with the thread work that is stitched onto each blade. Of course all the designs in the collection include a basting line around the appliqué shapes.

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Better Than A Paper Plate
Stitched on a BERNINA 880
featuring AURIfil Cotton Mako 50 wt thread
and Fabric from the Transformation line by Sarah Vedeler for Benartex

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Fussy Cutting
Stitched on a BERNINA 880
featuring AURIfil Cotton Mako 50wt thread

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Fussy Cutting
Stitched on a BERNINA 880
featuring AURIfil Cotton Mako 50wt thread

For a closeup look at a Better Than A Paper Plate quilt in blues with yellow accents, click here.