Batting Scraps

I finished drawing all the diagonal lines on the rugby stars fabrics so that's all ready for retreat next week.  I took my cutting board into the kitchen so I could mark the lines as I was pottering in there.  Would you believe that my son came along and used it as a food prep chopping board?!  He is still alive.  Just ;-) 

I can't work on my dancer picture until I get the pictures enlarged so I had to find something else to do.  That something else was something I've been putting off doing for a very long time...

Sorting batting scraps! I have a lot of scraps of batting!  Some have been donated because I make a lot of charity quilts and others have come off the ends of larger quilts I've quilted on the longarm.  I was storing them in these large laundry bags but age and sunlight have got the better of them and they've started to disintegrate.  The goal is to turn fairly large scraps into bigger scraps and then store them inside the washable laundry bags you see on the table.  They're labelled with the size of batting so if I make a quilt top I can clearly see if I have a size suitable for that project before I lazily just pull another sheet off the batting roll!

I straighten up the batting scrap edge.

 

Then zig zag stitch it to another straightened scrap edge.

I try not to have too many joins on the batting because it tends to start getting wavy but one or two joins tends to make something large enough to use for cot sized quilts.  I bought lots of  these panels at Big W for $10.  They include a panel for the top and fabric for the backing, although that backing fabric tends to be too small so I have to enlarge it.  But what a bargain!

Here's that particular panel made up.  I finished this one sometime last year.

If the scraps are too small to join I use them for Memory quilts.  Usually I'll have enough backing fabric on the quilt frame after quilting a larger quilt to back the baby quilts and I'll simply lay the small scraps of batting on top.  It saves wondering what to do with backing scraps and I only have to pin the backing on once.

So far I've joined enough scraps to make three cot sized panel quilts and I've thrown out one of my disintegrating laundry bags!