My Favorite Way to Baste a Quilt

Today I wanted to share my favorite basting method.

Surprised?! Yep I don't pin my quilts I spray them and  I LOVE both of these sprays! The yellow bottle is Dritz Quilting Spray Adhesive and the white is June Taylor Quilt Basting Spray. They make basting a quilt a breeze and much faster, at least for me. Before I tried spray basting I would spend hours pinning my quilts. It seemed no matter how hard I tried when pinning my quilt layers together they always shifted. I would pin the entire thing just to quilt one row and have to go back and re-pin pulling everything tight again and repeat the process over and over. I even resorted to using straight pins between my safety pins since I could pin them faster and keep things tighter but that only resulted in me getting stuck/scraped when I was quilting it. This is so much easier! I lay out my quilt back wrong side up and spray it. Then I spread my batting on it pressing it together while smoothing out any wrinkles. Then spray the batting and lay my quilt top on it. Smooth it out and its ready to quilt!

Now while this is my go to for quilt basting it isn't with out its drawbacks. First its not cheap. The regular price of the Dritz brand is $15.99 while the June Taylor brand is $12.99. I buy it at Joann's when they have a good sale or a good coupon. Both brands have worked well for me. I used the June Taylor one (first time trying that brand) on my queen size bunting quilt and had no issues.

Another thing I ran into is this stuff can ruin your manicure so be careful! I did not know this and here is what happened.

This is just regular nail polish and the basting spray kind of dissolved it making it tacky. It wasn't enough that the polish got on anything it just looked bad, I had cotton batting stuck all over my nails and it wouldn't wash off. Gel polish on the other hand was better. The batting still stuck to my nails as you can see.

That time it was really bad, but I was able to remove it with alcohol swabs and save my manicure. It just dulled the finish a bit.

 

Just something to be aware of if you are like me and keep your nails painted.  

Finally protect the surface you are spraying on. I bought a cheap, plastic, shower curtain specifically for this and just put under my quilts before spraying so it doesn't get on my carpet. It's a temporary adhesive so it does dissipate but I try to be careful and keep it off the carpet. 

Hope you find these tips useful and if you try it let me know what you think.

Ink Stain Removal

Today I though I would share a tip for removing ink stains. The other day my husband had an ink pen leak in his pocket.

We both thought these pants were a lost cause, but me being me I thought I would try to salvage them. I remembered reading that ink could be removed using alcohol and a quick google search confirmed this, but also said it depended on the type of ink pen. Well that pen was long gone so who knows what kind it was ,but again what did I have to lose.  So I got some cotton swabs and alcohol and had at it!

It was definitely doing something even if it was just making the stain bigger! If you try this make sure to have something behind the stain to absorb the ink because it does run!  I got a few ink blots on the inside pocket before I realized what happened. I ended up using a paper towel in front of a plastic baggie just to make sure I wasn't transferring the stain somewhere else. I just kept dabbing on alcohol and blotting it with paper towels.

It was getting lighter but still not good enough. So I poured a cupful of alcohol on it and let it set about 5 minutes then blotted again and let it dry.

Much better but still there.  Not wanting to give up I decided I would give it one last try so again I dabbed on alcohol and blotted with a clean paper towel and let dry.  And it worked!!!!

I couldn't believe it but it got the ink out! Not sure if it works on other fabrics or with all pens but these cotton khakis are good as new. If we have another mishap on a different fabric I will definitely give this a try and report back!