Quilt Qua

There are four different ways that batting can be made. They are: garneted, needle punched, thermal bonded, and thermal bonded can also be considered heat-sealed and resin bonded.

When a manufacturer garnets a bat it can be any fiber. It can be silk, wool, polyester, cotton, bleached cotton, unbleached cotton. The manufacturer puts whatever fiber they’re going to end up with into bins which feed a card.

The card combs a very thin layer of continuous layer of batting roughly 60 inches wide, and layers it onto a conveyor that’s going underneath a cross lapper and away from it and as it cross laps it laps it back and forth.

If the manufacturer wants a thick product they slow the conveyor down. If they want a thin product, we speed up that process. That way, the garnetted batting can be thick or thin. The garneted or carded bat is cut to width and rolled and nothing else is done to it.

In a carded or garneted bat the issues are that if you don’t quilt it very close together it will bunch and shift when you wash it, and it will beard. Antique quilts were basically made with garneted batting, so as long as they quilted were quilted very close together, there’s no problem.

If you look at an antique quilt and there’s a wide distance between the stitches, often you will see big voids where there’ll be a bunch of cotton batting somewhere and there’ll be none. That’s because it was a carded or garneted bat.

Today garneted batting is used only by commercial manufacturers, and is usually not sold in shops where quilters would buy it.

Note; This was taken from an interview with H.D. Wilbanks, batting expert from Hobbs Bonded Fibers. Mr. Wilbanks was interviewed in our Eavesdrop on a Telephone Conversation series, where people in quilting-related fields are asked questions that Eavesdropping Quilters want to know.