Basting a Silk Quilt Top

Pinning is absolutely out with this fine silk... the pin holes would look enormous and not easily covered with stitching. I'm not confident on using  spray glue on  light silk ( haven't tried it but it seems wrong. ) I am instead using a fine fusible web ( Misty Fuse) which I used also on the Winged Lion where it worked well.  It is a fine webbing of glue which with heat will adhere to both surfaces it sits between.  I suppose one could use a full sheet of misty fuse equal in size to the top but honestly... snippets of  webbed glue work fine.  I've cut a couple stacks of small squares  with the lower square  on the right of the picture (very sheer) being a single piece of web. Now we'll move to the back side and get started.

On this process, I work from the middle of the piece and away from it a bit at a time.  For understanding of the photos, I am using black batting ( dream poly) for this project... and a red/orange batik backing seen at outer edges. To get started, you can see I've laid out an almost checkerboard pattern on a few inches of the batting.

I'll then carefully place the top in place over the fusible web, then press according to instructions in the package. 

To be safe and protect the delicate silk, I use a pressing sheet atop the central silk image.

I then return to the front, a) roll back the top to expose non fused area, and b) repeat the fusing process as previously shown. c) Once the lower half is completely fused, I turned my piece around and fuse from the middle to the top. d) You might do otherwise but I followed the same process to fuse the backing to the batting. This is a wee bit time consuming but really worth it.
Now, the  sandwich is fused front and back . As part of my  normal quilt prep. process I fold and pin to the front the outer edges of the backing  area that isn't fused.  It only took one failure in the past when not securing the loose edges of a backing to find it's quick insurance to do so to make absolutely certain nothing somehow folds backward into future quilted areas.     ;-D

I'm planning for quilting to begin in next post.