Did you know you can piece together batting scraps?
Sometimes when I’m cleaning out my sewing room, I ask myself why I’m keeping all these long skinny strips of batting around. They’re mostly strips cut off the edge of a quilt after quilting and can be anywhere from 5-10 inches wide.
This week I was sooooo happy to have them!
I ran out of batting with just a few blocks to go on the Wild Flowers quilt. I’m doing Quilt As You Go, so small pieces work, but they needed to be at least 10 1/2 inches and I had already used all the bits that size.
I’m trying to finish the quilt by this weekend, so it was time to grab some of those scraps and piece the batting together.
Did you know you could do that?
Yep! And it’s pretty darn easy.
Step 1
Set your machine to the widest, tallest zigzag you can.
Step 2
Butt the edges of two batting scraps and run them down the machine so that the seam runs right down the middle and the zigs and zags catch some of the batting on each side.
My machine often skips stitches when I do this. Don’t worry about it as long as most of them catch.
Step 3
Use the new, bigger piece of batting.
Butting the edges keeps you from getting a fat ridge of overlapped batting in there, and the zigzag stitch is plenty to hold the pieces together during construction. And look how nicely it all holds together once I add some quilting! Click on the image if you want to see it bigger so you can really see where that seam is.
So that’s it! I used up some of those bulky batting scraps and I’m ready to finish the last blocks for my quilt. No shopping needed!
Want to know what my favorite quilt batting is and why? I lay out all the details in this post – My Favorite Quilt Batting.
These links go to all my posts about quilt supplies.
- Quillt Sizes and Supplies Needed
- My Favorite Tools and Supplies and Where to Get Them
- Cuddle Fleece
- My Favorite Batting
- How to Piece Batting Scraps (a thrifty tip)
- Thread – no post here, just a reminder that you need thread. 🙂
- Putting Fusible Adhesive to the Test
- Which Products Do I Use When? Freezer Paper, Fusible Adhesive, or Sulky Sticky Fabri-solvy?
Finished with this topic?
Return to the Let’s Make a Quilt main Table of Contents.
Move on to the lessons about cutting and quilting your background blocks.
Happy stitching!
This is so helpful! I wouldn’t have known how to set my machine!
Happy to help! 🙂
Thank you for that nugget of info, just starting out in quilting and all these nuggets are needed!
Yeah…I do this all the time and haven’t had a problem. I know you used darker thread so we could see it but I learned the hard way after finishing a quilt that you need to use light colored thread to do the zig zag as it will show through light colored fabric!!:)
Oooh! That’s a totally important tip that I forgot to mention. Thanks so much for the reminder!
Just found your web-site. Love it!
I have joined batting scraps with a multi-step zig-zag. Do you think the single zig-zag works better? I will have to try it. Thanks for all the great info!
I’ve never tried the multi-step zigzag for it, but the single zigzag always works just fine. It gets reinforced really well with all the quilting in the next step. 🙂
It’s nice to know that I’m not the only one that uses scraps of anything especially batting!
Have been doing this for Harwich Community Center Quilt Bank, the outreach arm of Bayberry Quilters Guild of Cape Cod, MA.
We make hundreds of quilts each year for charitable causes, using donated materials for the most part. We do buy batting and the ladies do a fantastic job of salvaging scraps so they can be salvaged into patched battings. A wonderful example of helping other folks.
Try to combine strips of “same battings” so they feed more evenly. Using different weights or thicknesses can be a mis-match.
I do the same with Cutaway and Tearaway Stabilizer…:)
I overlap the two pieces of batting and then cut through both in a wave so when I remove the edge pieces, the bats will match together perfectly. I feel that there is a chance of one side slipping down (or up) if I use a straight line. I also sew the two pieces together with the 3 step zigzag (mending stitch) though that’s not necessary.