Oh yes , I remember using sad irons. In later years I used one for a doorstop and was running to answer the phone--barefoot. Yep! hit it and broke two toes! Saw one once in an antiques store painted with flowers, big price tag!

Oh ....my goodness..she was and I miss her so much..but with all her hard life..she made it to 93..with a broken leg one time and the had 3 screws put in one hip...one time...I took her to a new Dr..here by me..one time...she was about 84..and the Dr.. ask her "Mrs. Bishop, when was the last time you had a pap smear...she said..." I haven't ever had one and I ain't about to start now"!!...and she didn't...lOL LOL the Dr. just smiled and said "OK"...and went onto something else...she was very healthy and got dimentia the last year of her life..I just pray I make it that far..so I can do all the quilts on my bucket list...

This is what my grandmother had to do when she was young. It was still being done by many quilters when I learned to quilt 56 years ago. My grandmother had rolled batting when she taught me. It was hard to locate and no where near the quality of the many different types of batting available today.

I know someone in Penn. that raises alpaca and she too shears and cards and looms and weaves and/or knits,crotchets with it. Beautifully feeling yarn! I don't know if she uses it in quilts, I will ask her....

I used these in the 70s when I was in 4-H to work my lambs wool (while it was still on the lamb.) It was hard, you had to hit the lamb with them to get down into the wool, then tug it out. This made the lamb fluffy for show. What was bad, was that I was allergic to the lanolon(sp) in the wool. So everyone thought I was crying when I brushed my lamb. At the sale the purchaser paid for my lamb then turned around and gave her back because he thought I wanted to keep her.

Our local museum has a fibers course where we learn about cotton, linen and wool, and the process to get it all the way to fabric. One of the things that children were expected to do every day (1850's and before) was to pick the seeds from the cotton, generally they got to pick enough cotton to fill one of their shoes with seeds( each day). Before the cotton Gin, all the work was done in the home. During our Colonial times families were taxed by the British to spin a certain amount of wool a year. The British had just gotten mills to weave into cloth. A great deal was needed so often a woman in the extended family (usually an older single lady) became the spinner for the family. In exchange for spinning fiber this woman got room and board and a place with family. She became known as a Spinster. (seriously). When carding to take the wool or cotton off you reverse one of the card and it will roll into a loose roll this is called a rollag I have probably butchered the spelling. The rollag is used to feed the spinning wheel while making thread. The rollag could also be used to make the batting. When you make felt you pull the fiber to make it all go in the same direction, then you go back and lay another layer of fiber the opposite direction. We don't realize it, but before the industrial revolution women were spinning every single day of the year. Often if they didn't have a loom, there was a man in the town who wove for many. He is where they would get their fabric from. I think it takes 4-5 full time spinners to keep a weaver busy. Also the term distaff came from spinning. There are also many fairy tales with spinning wheels in them I figure it had to do with Mom, busy spinning, and telling stories to her kids for entertainment. By the way there are no sharp points that anyone could prick their finger with. On a walking wheel there is a long prong thing that comes out from the spinning wheel, that tapers but it is far from sharp.
Hope I didn't cover what was already said.

Loved all of these stories...funny how I never thought of the wool being used as batting. It's amazing how they had time and patience to make quilts in the early days.

Thank you for sharing great history with everyone! I've learned so much from this one thread. It's so important to keep the history of sewing alive and teach it to younger people new to quilting.

Wintersewer is right. They were talking about pulling the batting apart and then spreading it evenly on the quilt.

This is such an interesting thread. I'd been wondering what people used for batting in the 1800s and early-to-mid 1900s. Carding sounds quit difficult!

This was so interesting. I was at a friends house yesterday, she had a quilt that was made by her G. Aunt in 1943, it is a scrappy quilt of printed feed bags and white. Thousands of tiny hand quilted stitches. Quite lumpy. I lay you dollar to donuts that it was carded.:eek:

Just talked to my dad (late 80's). He doesn't remember his mother or grandmother carding cotton or wool for batting. They were using up whatever they had lying around. The only carding being done was carding of old wool blankets to collect wool to be made into new blankets. Inside the quilt was flannel, old blankets, or old sheets. Sheets were used until it wore through. Then it was patched, and it wouldn't have been used in a quilt until the patch had worn through. Dad remembers them tying a number of quilts, which wouldn't have been consistent with carding cotton or wool for batting. I have one of their quilts and it is hand-quilted, and I remember a number of others which were hand-quilted. (They were all hand-pieced, too, although they had a sewing machine - treadle, then later electric).

The fabric for piecing the quilts was left-overs from sewing clothing, good pieces from worn-out clothing, and white fabric from worn out sheets. My grandmother was born in 1894, and great-grandmother in 1866. Dad remembers the quilting frame in the living room during the winters before the 1930's.

We have one of my husband's grandmother's quilts - a popcorn quilt. I think it's much more recent, though, because much of the fabric is crepe. It's made from squares of fabric, folded in half diagonally. Then one side of the triangle is sewn, turned right side out, stuffed with batting, sewed up. Then the triangles are whipstitched together. I'm pretty sure the batting is polyester, but this style of quilt could easily have been carded cotton, so that could have been how she learned to quilt.