If I’m quilting something that is fairly small, I typically use straight pins to baste the top, batting, and backing together. Granted, I also get poked with the pins a lot, too, and sometimes they fall out before I’m ready to remove them. When I saw the Pinmoor system, I thought it looked like a great solution. These are soft little silicon pieces that you put on the ends of your straight pins. They help keep the pins from falling out, and they also keep your hands from getting poked. Mine are 3/8″ diamter and about 1/4″ long. I bought a package of 50 last summer. Looking at their website, it looks like their current product is twice as long as mine. They come in all different colors and even assorted color packages, but I wanted mine all white. I buy all white glass-head straight pins, too, because I find it less distracting.
Because my Pinmoors are thinner, I push my pin through the diameter of the little piece of silicon, which is the opposite of how they show them used on the website. I just have to make sure I don’t push the pin all the way through, as shown in this picture. Otherwise, I’ll still get poked. This quilt top has a lot of fused elements, so I pinned through the background areas, maybe 4″ apart. It seemed to work very well for this 24″ square quilt top.
It was nicer quilting when I wasn’t getting poked or scratched. I was careful to remove the pins before I quilted too close to that area. I just keep a pretty blue bowl next to my sewing machine and drop the Pinmoors in the bowl as I go.
On a large quilt, I usually use safety pins to baste it all together. I think I could use the Pinmoors instead and not have to bother with opening all those safety pins. Some safety pins leave big holes in the fabric, too, so being able to use thinner straight pins is an advantage, especially for delicate fabrics. It also seemed faster to baste the quilt with straight pins rather than safety pins. For this little quilt top, I didn’t even use half of my package of fifty, but I’ll probably need a second package to pin a large quilt. Now, I really need to go because I need to finish quilting!