Spray Adhesive as a Basting Solution

Pinning a bedspread-size quilt is quite a job. It takes a couple hundred safety pins and plenty of wear and tear on my knees and back to get the job done.  I'd been reading about spray adhesives, and after doing some research, decided to be brave and give it a go.

And me being "me", I couldn't experiment on just a few scraps or a small project. Nooooo.  That would make too much SENSE!  Instead - I did it on this quilt - my William Morris print, a over-size queen bedspread.

And the results? Oh... I'm not really pleased.

In the photo below, you can see that it's apparently holding OK - but... when I started to pick the project up off the floor, the corners fanned loose - so I ended up supplementing the adhesive with pins. Now - to be fair - I only had to use about 1/4 of the pins I normally would - but even so... it's just not the result I wanted.

I'm very grateful to the author of the blog "The Crafty Quilter" - and her post about using spray adhesive. She advises to use as little as possible of the spray - and also notes that it takes more adhesive if you are working with polyester. And that was my problem. My top and backing are 100% cotton, but the batting is polyester - and I had to use an entire can of spray to get it to stick (and again, it still didn't really stick all that well).

I'm glad I tried it - and may try it again if I decide to do a project with wool, cotton, or bamboo batting. I sure do like the idea of having a tool that makes the "sandwich" step go faster/easier.