Here's what I do:

If you have a big enough floor space, spread out the sheet. If you can, duct tape it to the floor. Yes! duct tape! Masking tape will do. If you can't tape it, just be careful not to introduce wrinkles.

Spread out the batting, and then the quilt top.

Starting at the middle and using quilter's safety pins, start pinning the 3 layers together, at about 4 inch intervals, until you've pin-basted the entire thing together. Un-tape the backing and you're off.

Stitching in the ditch is completely acceptable, as is outline quilting the pieces, or whatever. You could also just tuft quilt it, with yarn knots every few inches. For our back door quilt I "prairie-sashiko'ed" it. I'm trying to find my entry on it but the search function has suddenly decided to suck. Basically I just took big basting stitches with thin, strong yarn--making a pattern of its own. That works best on whole-fabric quilts like my door quilt.

Lynn Siprelle, Editor