As I work each week to dig out from under my never-ending supply of scraps, I end up making more quilt tops, which then need to be quilted. And of course that means batting! But in the course of cleaning up last month, I pulled out all my batting scraps, and.....
Oh my gosh!!! How did THAT happen? Well, it happened because it's easier to cut off a new piece from the roll than to piece batting scraps together, right? But this is more than ridiculous. Time to make some frankenbatting! So I thought, for those of you who may not have tried this before, it might be time for a short tutorial.
While it's possible and simple to zigzag your batting together, today I'm going to show you how to fuse it together using plain old lightweight fusible interfacing. This is my preferred method because I'm too lazy to get out my zigzag machine!
You'll need two (or more) pieces of batting, the lightest weight fusible interfacing you have on hand or can buy, a rotary cutter, straight edge ruler and an iron.
If your batting pieces look like mine, the edges aren't straight or even! But this is easy to fix.
Lay your two pieces on a cutting board, overlapping the edges.
Lay your straight edge ruler over the overlap, being sure that you have two full thicknesses under your ruler. Cut through both layers.
Now when you separate your pieces, you should have two straight edges and two small slivers to throw away. Even if you are sewing your batting together this is a good first step, to give you straight edges to join.
Now take your interfacing and cut enough 1" wide strips to cover the whole cut line of your batting. This is a great way to use up interfacing scraps, too!
Lay your batting on the ironing surface, being sure that if it has a scrim (a thin layer of polyester that the fiber is punched into) it is facing down away from the heat of the iron. You don't want to melt it onto your hot iron! Butt the straight edges of the batting together, then lay the fusible side of the interfacing strip down over the two edges. Press with a medium-hot iron.
Voila! You now have one piece of batting where there were two! It's flexible, holds together well, and won't give you any problems to quilt through.
You can buy a similar product in rolls specifically made for fusing batting like this, but I had interfacing on hand and decided to see if it would work similarly. Lo and behold, it did - and it was free because I already had lots of pieces left over from my garment sewing days. Fusible interfacing is cheap (99 cents for a yard of 20" wide ultra-featherweight, less than that with a coupon) and you can get 20 yards of batting fusible strips from that!
I hope this helps you all deal with your batting scraps, as it is helping with mine! I'm also sorting mine out by width, and marking each piece with a width measurement so that it is simple to locate pieces that will work for my project. Organization is the key, right?
See you next week (if I don't get buried in scraps!)
Hugs!
Sarah
