justflyingin

Where did you hear this?

Peckish

I know that polyester clothing can melt to the skin, and poly batting will melt, but I would think that the cotton top and backing would act as a barrier and stop the melted poly from fusing to skin.

I have a fireman friend, I'll have to ask him if he's had any experience with this.

Sewnoma

I like both - I agree polyester is more "lofty", but sometimes that's not what you want!

I also often find a need to use black batting, and so far I haven't seen cotton batting in black so I use black poly. I've never tried Hobbs (which I know has a blend in black) because I tend to need to quilt farther apart than it allows.

If I want shrinkage and crinkles - cotton. If I want puffy and smooth - poly!

MaryStoaks

I use poly most of the time because it's cheap and the quilts are for everyday use and will be washed a lot. For special quilts I like cotton best but it's expensive.

ghostrider

I believe the response you'll get will be that polyester nightwear is in close contact with the skin and surrounds the body so is more of a potential hazard that a poly batt quilt which is (usually) loosely covering the body. That's what I've been told anyway.

The top and backing, being cotton, will burn to ash and disappear quickly, so I don't think that's any real protection against burns from poly batting if a child were wrapped in it. It's just not something I'm willing to risk at all, no matter what the age of the person I'm making the quilt for.

Tartan

Any fabric is going to burn unless treated with fire retardant chemicals which only slow it down.Do you know what happens when fabric treated with fire retardant burns? It releases nasty, harmful chemicals. Most firemen will tell you the smoke will kill you quicker than the fire.

Pennyhal

When I started quilting, I used poly bat because it was easy to get, inexpensive, easy to hand quilt, and I could get it in different weights. If I wanted a really big fluffly quilt to tie, it was no problem! It can tend to beard, but some of them have a scrim on the top now to reduce it and I think you can get it in black now too. Then nice cotton bats came along and I decided to make a quilt with one. It was very very difficult to hand quilt. I could only take one or two stitches at a time and it made my hand sore. As a result, I started machine quilting my quilts that I used cotton with. It was nice to machine quilt because it layed flat and it sort of grabbed the cotton which helped in quilting. But I love hand quilting. Someone on this Board suggested to me to get samples of bats from the companies that make them. Then make a little mini quilt out of the squares; hand quilt one half of the square and machine quilt the other half. That way you can try out all the different bats and see which one you like best. If I had to buy a whole roll of each bat, it'd be forever before I tried them all out!