Spay baste warning.

I love 501 spray. I am of the personal opinion that anyone who spends hours hand basting a quilt deserves to be locked up in a mental health facility. (I shall of course allow the walls to be padded in Warm and Natural wadding. )And anyone who pin bastes obviously has a little more sense but needs to go on a compulsory re-education programme. And for those who have objections on the grounds of anti-chemical arguments, well, that at least is a reasoned choice so I shall merely place you on a watch for other signs of lunacy. Anyone unable to use it for allergy reasons has my sympathies and is excepted from my prejudiced comments.

For the uninitiated, 501 is a low tack spray baste. The method of basting a quilt is so simple and quick. Secure the backing taut as you would anyway. ( I use straight pins to anchor it to the carpet. Or with a medium size quilt on my design board so I can baste vertically. ) Spray it with the spray which falls like artificial snow so you can see where it is going. Lay the wadding (batting) over it. If it is a big quilt it helps to have a friend hold two corners, you hold two. Kind of billow it out and let it fall down as you would a picnic blanket on a nice grassy spot. The spray is a temporary adhesive, so if wrinkles appear, you can simply lift and replace or smooth out. Spray again and lay the top down. Done. It holds a king size quilt no problem. It does not need to be quilted immediately. It does not hinder quilting. No pins need to be removed as you quilt. No threads get caught in your foot. It is quite simply the best quilting invention ever.

So why the warning? Well, I use rolls of wadding and so usually cut the wadding to about 4 inches or so bigger than the quilt before I start this process. This quilt at 96 x 96 was too big for my 90 inch wadding roll so I bought yardage of extra wide Warm and Natural and 108 inch backing fabric. My floor space at home is too small to baste a quilt this size so I took it to work after hours ( much to the bemusement of the security guards and the cleaners!).

Once there I realised that, whilst I had iron, board, pins, spray and quilt, I did not have scissors. Those in the clerks room had been used for centuries to cut the traditional pink twill ribbon which goes around our briefs and would not even attempt to cut the wadding or fabric to size. So, I just left a longer overlap to trim at home. No problem. Except, I did not measure where the quilt top would go before I sprayed the wadding - didn't need to check there was enough space - there was loads.

Too much in fact. Because I ended up with a large area of un-topped wadding with spray on it. So? So I crawled over it to smooth down the centre of the quilt a little. And this is what happened to my black trousers....

Warm and Natural might not beard but stray fibres can certainly be spray basted to clothing. Now this may be a discovery of some use to innovative textile artists but I really did not want to have to walk past the security guards again looking like this. I can tell you that the bulk of such stray fibres can be 'waxed' off your legs using brown packing tape from the post room. But the trousers will certainly need dry cleaning. You are warned!