Irish Chain Loaded and Ready

After that on-line class I was anxious to get started on the Double Irish Chain.  I loaded it last night.  This quilt is 81" x 110" and it was about the time I was pressing the backing and top that I was wishing I had a 4' x 8' ironing board!

Here is the quilt loaded onto the frame.  I just wanted to show how I float the top by basting the batting and then bringing the top up to the basting line and basting again through all 3 layers.  Clear as mud I'm sure!

Here you can see that I do roll the quilt onto the bar but the upper edge is not attached to the take-up roller.  I find that I have more control over the top this way and it is much quicker too. I will have a video of how I load my quilts on my website hopefully in the next week or so, it depends on how long it will take me to finish the Double Irish Chain and get another ready to load!

The border fabric had me stumped for awhile as to what sort of quilting I should do.  The pattern of the fabric is quite bold so I felt that anything obvious would be just that - too obvious.  I decided to use the pattern of the fabric as a guide and chose to quilt a meandering ribbon.  Because there was going to be quite a bit of back-track quilting in the pattern I didn't want to stress out that my quilting lines were going to be perfect so that is why the ribbon 

style - the lines are supposed to cross!

 Here are a couple pictures of the back of the quilt so far.  I'm using simple muslin for backing and King Tut #951 Brooklet on the front and Bottom Line #652 Statue in the bobbin.

Tomorrow I will start to quilt the centers of the chain :)