sewingpup

The large bolt/spool would be wonderful, but my quilting frame doesn't have the extra bar to hold it onto the frame. This means I'll have to wrangle the thing each time I want to cut another piece. At age 70, I don't wrangle so good anymore![/QUOTE]

My long arm is in the basement, the batting is up on the second floor. What I did was take two old dining room chairs. (The ones with the spindle backs), place them back-to-back with space in between large enough for the roll of batting. Then I used an old shower curtain rod (could use a piece of pvc pipe) to suspend the roll of batting like a roll of toilet paper. The I use a bit of leftover wooden trim from my remodeling to use as a straight edge to draw a chalk line with my chalk marker across the batting where I want to cut it (this is easy to keep in place because of the spindles in the chair backs) I measure how much I need with one of those long tape measures being careful not to stretch the batting. As the batting rolls are light, it is easy to take one off the curtain rod and slip on the other one. This works well for me. As the long arm is in the basement on concrete floor, I also devised a sling underneath the long arm using an old sheet and left over selvage edges. I fan fold the batting and toss it into the sling so it stays off the floor while loading the quilt. Low tech all around but works and it all was free!