When quilting, the batting can present it's own challenges. I'll show you how to fix them!
Preventing Bearding
When the needle goes through the batting and pokes batting through your fabric, that is called bearding. That is why you want the scrim, or the mesh side of the batting, to be against your backing fabric. The needle will go through the top or front side of quilt sandwich easily.
If you’re getting bearding with almost every stitch, change your needle. Dull needles push batting fibers through fabric. If you are only getting bearding every now and again, that means that the batting is on upside-down so turn the batting over.
Spray Basting
The mesh or the scrim sometimes doesn't play nice with spray basting. If you are experiencing wrinkles when spray basting before quilting, it could be that you have the batting upside down. Try turning it over and see if you get better results.
Fusing
Let’s say that you have fusible on the fabric and you are just fusing that directly onto your quilt batting. If you fuse onto the scrim side, the back of the batting where that mesh is, it can cause wrinkles. The scrim reacts to the fusible and bunches up. Fuse to the front side.
Avoiding Waste: Joining Batting Pieces Together
Whether you send your quilt out to the quilter or you do it yourself, once the sides are trimmed, you end up with extra batting strips. I don’t want to just throw it away because I paid good money for that batting and I don’t like to waste things.
I join like types of batting together and there are a couple of different ways that you can do that. One way is with a simple zig-zag stitch.
First, even up both sides of the batting scrap with a ruler and rotary cutter. Butt the straight edges together and zig-zag to join them together. Join as many scraps as you like.
It doesn’t matter if they're going different directions (left or right) but, now that you know which is the top side and the bottom side, you want all of the joined pieces to have the top sides facing up and all of the bottom (scrim) sides facing down.
Another method that I ran into that I really like is using Heat Press Batting Together. It comes on a roll with a little bit of cellophane on top. This one happens to be 15 yards by one-and-a-half inches.
It is very sheer with a smooth side and a bumpy side. I fused it on the top side of batting scraps to join them together and it did a really nice job. I was concerned that, as a fusible, it would change the feel and hand of the batting but it didn’t.
I also tested it by fusing the scrim (back) side of batting scraps and didn't notice any puckering or wrinkling, except for maybe just a teeny, tiny bit.
Please share your batting tips below! See the full video here.
Have a day blessed with perfect stitches and GlitterFlex!!
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