Sewing Saturday – One of my favorite days!
It is nice when we have a productive morning, and the errands are all taken care of! We had hit a deer a few weeks back, and I finally have my truck back. It is nice to have that part of life back to normal. Next, I finished the bookkeeping for the businesses. Now, I have the rest of the day to do something just for me. It is Sewing Saturday time! As I am sure many of you have dealt with the same thing, I have a pile of pieces and parts of batting from all the machine quilting. Today, I am going to create usable pieces of batting – a little bit of frankenbatting is my focus for today.
What is Frankenbatting?
I chuckled when I first heard the term “Frankenbatting.” It is the process by which you piece together pieces of leftover batting in order to make a larger, usable piece. I usually overlap my pieces slightly and zig-zag the seam with a large open zig-zag. Once I am done with machine quilting that quilt, you can’t tell that there is an overlap.
Other quilters will tell you to straighten the edges of the two pieces you want to connect. Line up the edges and use a wide, open zig-zag to connect them. I am going to tell you it is a personal choice. If you quilt with lots of open areas, you may want to use the second method to make sure you can’t feel the seam.
Ultimately, creating larger, usable pieces of batting will save money as well as help to organize my sewing room. Those results make me happy.
UPDATE: I just realized that part of my post wasn’t published. See below.
When you are creating frankenbatting, you will want to use all the same types of batting. I use two different types of 80/20 batting, but I try not to mix the two different brands in the frankenbatting. They are slightly different. No reason to do all that hard work to find that they wash and dry differently.
How many seams are too many?
Baby quilts and lap quilts are perfect for frankenbattings. I haven’t used it for larger quilts because I have the wide batting here; plus, I don’t want to wrangle the larger pieces through my sewing machine. I am happier using them for the smaller-size quilts. If I was desperate? You betcha I would frankbat as many as needed to finish a project!
Sewing Saturday Goals
So, for today, I just have a couple of goals:
- Frankenbatting
- Cut out and organize two projects
- Create two bindings
Anything else I accomplish is purely icing on the cake. So, what will you focus on today? Are you starting the Row by Row Sampler? Do you have a list of projects you want to finish, like I do? Or are you looking at using up some fabric scraps while creating scrap quilts? Whatever you are working on this weekend, enjoy the process!
Until next time.
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