thanks everyone. There really is no alternative to the batting.
After looking at a youtube video of a serger. I have never seen one of these before, or electric scissors. I will have to investigate these more.
I attempted to clamp the batting between two pieces of plywood and cut it with a bandsaw but the edges of the cut produced too much fuzz.
I envision a method where I could somehow tightly wrap a long length of batting around a cardboard tube, like from a wrapping paper roll, and then tightly wrapping this with construction paper and then cutting it on a bandsaw, so that when each cut section was unwrapped it would be very long. Not sure if I will ever figure out how to make this work. either way thanks for the suggestions.
DW