I am entering the home stretch.  The Gator quilt is finally ready to quilt.

This quilt is being made without batting; just the quilt top and the fleece backing.  Sandwiching it was not fun and very hard to get flat.  When I am doing this, I generally use my hands and do a lot of flattening and smoothing out.  I do this with spray baste.  However, with the Gator quilt, I was afraid that if I ran my hands of the quilt top too much, my chalked quilt markings would be rubbed out.  So then I tried to do this with the quilt top on the bottom and laid the fleece on top – DISASTER!  Everything was wrinkly.

The problems didn’t end there.  The backing is tight on size.  I only have about 2″ on the top and bottom to spare.  Twice I sandwiched it and couldn’t get the fabric centered and ran out at the ends.  About 1 1/2 hours later (did I say I was doing this in the garage in the heat), I got it together, but it wasn’t perfect.  The top was smooth and flat – the quilt marks stayed perfectly – but this is what the back looked like:

I think the fleece got stretched out at some point.  So what I did was move this wrinkle slowly – remember is was spray basted – and little by little it moved to the edges.  It was kind of like moving an air bubble when you put on a screen protector.  In the end all turned out well.