A Little About Cotton Batting From A Batting Expert

H.D. Wilbanks, batting expert from Hobbs Bonded Fibers, presents a description of cotton batting:

Cotton is, as you know it's grown. It is a natural product. It breathes.

If you"re a hand quilter and you are going to be using cotton don"t expect it to be as easy to hand quilt as polyester, wool, or silk.

Typically cotton does not beard. Bearding we define as working its way through the fabric itself. Whereas, it will punch through the needle hole, or you can pull it through the thread, but it"s not going to typically beard.

It is a natural fiber so it breathes. And it does shrink, while polyester typically doesn"t shrink. So if you want an antique looking quilt (all the antiques quilts basically were puckered a little because they shrank), then you would very possibly want to use cotton batting.

All cotton batting is needle punched it so it"s typically going to be thinner than most of the polyester. Some cotton batting has a scrim.

Needle punching process makes it stronger, definitely extends the quilt distance. In a needle punch bat you can go up to 3 or 4 inches apart, if it"s fairly heavily needle punched.

If it"s real lightly needle punched again you"ll be able to tell that, because it will stretch. You"ll be able to pull on it and see that it stretches easily.

A scrim binder is a little piece of polypropylene; and it is like a very light weight piece of interfacing. It is needle punched on to, typically, a cotton batting to give it additional strength.

If you see that a particular cotton batt can be quilted up to 8 to 10 inches apart, usually that means that has a scrim in it. If it doesn"t have a scrim and it says it"s up to 8 to 10 inches apart then that should mean that it"s a heavily needlepunched cotton bat.

A lightweight cotton bat that"s needle punched only without a scrim should not be quilted that far apart.

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