The Process of Sandwiching & Pinning a Quilt

I thought it would be interesting to show the process of sandwiching and pinning a quilt. I tape my backing fabric to the floor with painters tape, stretching it as tight as feels appropriate. Personally I don't think painters tape does as well as duct tape, but my husband thinks it's better for our wood floor.:( I didn't have the money to buy enough fabric for the entire back of my quilt, so I pieced it together this time. Note to self: I like my quilt backs better when I'm poor and can't get by with being lazy.*wink Then, I smooth my batting down over my backing fabric. I've been using Hobbs 80/20 for a few years and I love it for hand quilting. I buy it in 30 yard rolls at 96" long and it is awesome to have around. So then, I spread my quilt top on top of the batting and smooth, smooth, smooth every wrinkle out starting from the center and working out to the edges. After that, I dump my quilt pins out and start pinning from the center out. With hand quilting, I don't have to worry about a grid or absolute quilting lines, so I just pin every 3 or 4 inches. Afterwards, I trim off any extra long ends of my batting and rip off the tape. Usually I put the center of my quilt in the hoop to start with and work steadily out from the center on each side in a circle. This time I am starting with the bottom right corner because I want to try working with "free fans". This way I won't have to mark my quilt at all! I'm very nervous about this, but you can't learn unless you try, right?