Batting

I was looking at a magazine a couple of days ago and a quilting blog today and both had some information about batting so naturally I thought I would add my two cents. This two cents is not for machine quilters since I don't know anything about that. But for those who are still hand quilting or are just beginning to quilt I have two warnings and some personal experiences. Quilting stitches are judged as much by their evenness as they are by their smallness so if you can't quite achieve more than ten stitches per inch but your stitches are  evenly spaced and evenly sized, front and back, then you are doing fine. One way to force yourself to keep everything even is to quilt with colored thread that stands out from the background of your quilt instead of blending in. This can be in small places at first, say the veins on a leaf, or you can make an Amish style quilt with contrasting thread and work on your skills over the entire surface.

I have used pretty much every kind of batting that there is except the new green batting made from soda bottles. They vary in many ways but the most obvious one experienced first is how easy or hard they are to needle. Polyester batting is easy to needle, comes in many sizes, doesn't shrink, washes well, but beards a lot. There are many purists who would never use polyester batting at all--it will certainly last longer than either the surface or the backing of your quilt. Cotton batting or 80/20 blends are both harder to needle than polyester and both shrink more as well. Lots of people like the look and feel of cotton which washes well but takes longer to dry than polyester alone. Wool battings vary tremendously by manufacturer. Some are very fluffy, shrink like crazy, shift even as you work on them. Hobbs wool is easy to use and easy to quilt--one of my favorites to work with. I don't dry my quilts in the electric dryer--at most I spin them for only five minutes to get out excess water--so if it shrinks at all I wouldn't know. Wool filled quilts are lightweight but warm.  Silk is similar to wool in its ease of needling. It needs more caution in washing and drying than wool so if you give one as a gift you should send the care instructions with it. That's a good idea for most gift quilts anyway. Silk is lightweight so not as warm as any of the others.

Finally, the two battings I will never use again--bamboo and bonded polyester. Bamboo sounds like a great idea and perhaps if one machine quilts it is, but for a hand quilter it is a nightmare. I made a full sized quilt with bamboo batting, broke 46 needles doing so, couldn't get the stitches smaller at all, suffered through the worst bearding I have ever seen. Never again. The bonded batting wasn't that bad but the bonding layer made small stitches hard to achieve and made needling hard as well. It was supposed to minimize or eliminate bearding and it did do that so there was one positive note.