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!