Rose L

I melted the poly in a comforter once just by putting it in the dryer after washing. If the other suggestions don't work, I would cut away the stiff offending parts as much as possible and spray baste a new strip of batting along the area. Once you get the binding sewed down around it I doubt if anyone would notice a thing. So sorry this happened to you. I'm sure your MIL will be pleased regardless.

watterstide

So how did it turn out? i melted a fleece blanket once, in the dryer..to hot and in there to long. the softness was gone and it felt all rough. so i am sure that is was happened to it. it is now in the car for winter emergencies!

i hope it worked out for you..but honestly, i think it will be fine, and your MIL will be happy and proud to have it!

JanieH

I am curious to know how the wetting worked also. I sure hope that the quilt fairies came during the night and puffed it up!

smagruder

Patience is a virtue.. give it time. Hope it is better today.

slhager

Here are a couple pictures but I don't think you can tell much. It's the border between the quilt and the binding. You can kind of see the flatness then the fluffiness. No, it the genie didn't come last night.

jillaine

looks like a beautiful quilt; now I want to see the whole thing!!

memepat

You might try wetting it with a spray bottle and right before it is dry use a hair dryer on COOL SETTING to finish drying. This may help add fluffy back some. Good Luck.

She In PA

I would open the binding up and lay strips of batting in there and resew the binding. If you don't fix it you will always look at that quilt and notice it. It's a beautiful quilt that you took a lot of time to make. Just buckle down and fix it with extra batting.

AlwaysQuilting

In the photos it looks as though you haven't quilted the area yet? If that's true, then I'd just open up the binding in that section and cut away the 'melted' batting and put in a fresh piece.

TrenbeathRanch

Hi Sweetheart...I've got good news and bad news. We'll start with the good news! Your pictures look gorgeous...the imperfections that you see are because you are micro-focused on the edge of the quilt right now (only seeing the binding and the border) because that is the portion of the quilt that you are working on. This is something that your MIL will never do! Think about it...when you examine a quilt, do you ever really look at the edges? No, we mainly focus on the body of the work, the patterns, the fabrics, the colors...that's the truth. So, try to expand your perspective on the project and see the WHOLE work...that's what everyone else will do. Really, really.

The bad news is that your batting apparently had scrim (since it didn't recover with the water treatment). Scrim is the layer of coating on batting which keeps it together and allows a bit of tug or pull during construction. It's almost like interfacing, since it has a bunch of tiny wholes. Batting without scrim is difficult to handle because it's like working with a cotton ball...very delicate and will easily lose it's shape with the slightest pressure. I've worked with both (scrimmed and scrimless) equally as often.

However, most scrim have a very low melting point (around 250 degrees). When it "melts", what really happens is that all the tiny little wholes are fused closed...not allowing the batting fibers below it to breath or fluff. It's permanent, I'm afraid.

The scrim will be normal on the backside, however, and still have fluff, unless you ironed both sides.

It is possible to iron batting with scrim, you just have to be careful to use the lowest heat setting and not let the iron sit on the fabric too long. I'm sorry to bear the bad news, honey.

As someone else mentioned, it can be fixed but it's labor intensive. You would have to pick out the quilting from the affected border sections, return to 3 separate layers, cut out the flat batting, replace with fresh batting, re-quilt, then bind. Otherwise, refer to the "good news" above and chalk it up to a wisdom gaining experience! I'm sorry.