Piecing Together Quilt Batting
Heather ThomasDescription
After a quilt has been layered and quilted, most times there will be some excess quilt batting that needs to be trimmed away from around the edges. Rather than throwing away all of your smaller scrap sizes of batting, save them and learn how quick and easy it can be to piece together small pieces of batting- Heather Thomas shows you how.
Batting
Quilt batting comes in all sorts of different sizes and materials. You can find cotton, polyester, blended and many other types of batting as well as batting in crib, twin, queen, king and other sizes. How to choose the right quilt batting will depend on the project you are making and the end result you are wanting. However, no matter what type of quilt batting you choose, you can use Heather’s method of piecing together small scraps of batting into larger pieces so you can always get the most use out of your quilt supplies.
Piece
When piecing together small pieces of batting Heather first explains that you need to have a perfectly straight edge on both pieces being stitched together. This is because the pieces are laid next to each other and then stitched, rather than laying the pieces right sides together and stitching. Heather explains that she pieces the batting together this way to ensure that the batting remains flat. When applying batting to a quilt you don’t want to have any wrinkles, puckers or other imperfections that could shows through the quilt top. Heather demonstrates how to stitch the pieces of quilt batting together, explaining what type and size of stitch she is using. She then explains that any small waves in the batting that can occur when
Did you know that you can sew pieces of batting together to yield larger pieces? I've always got lots of scraps of batting laying around. And nine times out of 10, when I go to quilt something, I don't have a large enough piece of batting. So I started piecing them together. And there's a really wonderful, easy way to do it. What you don't want to do is piece it together like you would two pieces of fabric. So you don't want to lay it right sides together and sew a seam and fold it over, because you'd end up with a big lumpy area where that seam allowance is. Instead, what you want to do is make sure that you have perfectly straight cut edges, and zigzag those two together. We're simply going to butt those up right next to each other with no overlapping and then zigzag them together. So I'll show you how easy this can be. And I'm just going to fold these two sides in, so that it's not so cumbersome. And that's what I do when I'm sewing big, big pieces together, I fold them up. And I'm going to lay this underneath here. And I've got my machine set on a zigzag that is relatively wide on my machine, it's a 3.5. You could go up to a five if you wanted to. And I'm spreading that zigzag apart. So my stitch length on this is a two. And I'm simply going to start at the edge here. And butt the batting up. First, I'm going to make sure my feed dogs are up. And bat the butting up next to each other. Making sure that it doesn't overlap. And there we go. We've taken a too small piece of batting and joined it together into a large enough piece of batting for our next project. Now, I would not do this with this high contrast thread, I would do it with matching thread, but I wanted you to be able to see that seam. It's this easy. If you get this little bit of rumpling, it's not a big deal. You can simply smooth that out during the basting. Or if you want to, you can take a steam iron to it and press it entirely flat. It's nice and sturdy. Sewn together very, very well. And then once you do that quilting, it's going to hold it together even more. So you can take all those excess pieces of battings that you have, and turn them into larger battings and use up your scraps.
What is the best way to remove wrinkles from batting?
I have done this for years. I call it Frank-en-Batting.
I overlap the pieces about 1" and use a rotary cutter to make a scallop that wanders from one side of the inch to the other. The pieces butt together nicely. I use a bit of blue masking tape to hold the pieces in place, then sew the zigzag to complete the join. The tape is removed as I go. This avoids a 'line' inside the front and back. Once it's quilted, no one could notice the join.
I use a lot of high loft polyester batting in babies floor quilts, what is the best way to join this batting?