I'm quilting a wall hanging right now, but my needle is "not going through the batting like butter", like I hear many ladies say. My hand could use a little bit of a rest. Any suggestons?

I am hand quilting a quilt for a friend and her bat is "silk". Just wonderful with a medium loft and so soft to quilt through. Probably a bit pricy.

I have heard that bamboo is extremely easy to hand quilt . I also recently read it tends to beard a bit. They recommended using black bamboo batting for darker colored quilts.

Hope this is a bit helpful.

I like the 80/20, it's really easy to quilt.

I was always a W&N user, but Quilters Dream Cotton and Dream Wool are so much easier to hand quilt. The Dream Cotton comes in 4 different lofts (thicknesses). There are so many great choices in that brand.

This is really a matter of personal choice and I am sure there are many different opinions.
I perfer low loft battings for my quilts, especially Hobbs 80/20, Legacy 80/20, 100% cotton by Tuscany or Legacy and also Quilter's Dream cotton request. I have also tried a bamboo blend 50/50, silk and wool and they are also great for hand quilting.
I don't like battings made with a scrim, for me they are difficult to hand quilt.

I use the 80/20 and love it but have recently bought some bamboo. OMgosh, it's high but it is awesome. Soon wall hangins and smaller projects, I would suggest the bamboo. Even for larger but for cost efficienct I would continue to use the 80/20 warm. ♥♥

batts without scrim are best for hand quilting- the scrim is what makes it hard to stitch through.
hobbs has many very soft fine nice batts-
the 'dream batts' are also wonderful and those the poly, cotton, wool and silks are all just wonderful to stitch!
but the hobbs is probably the ones you should be looking for, they are wonderfully soft, in many lofts and (made for hand quilting) hobbs heirloom 80/20 is a great one and easy to find- inexpensive

I belong to a hand quilting group and for both of my quilts we have used Hobbs 80/20. One quilter used wool batting and it was wonderful to quilt.

mltquilt

I like Mountain Mist Quilt Light, which is a polyester batt. I'm also very fond of Mountain Mist Blue Ribbon cotton, and just used and liked Hobbs Polydown, another polyester batting.

On my next quilt, I'm going to try wool. I've heard lots of good things about it.

Janet

PS... It might not be the batting...you might check how tight the sandwich is. If it's too tight it will be harder to quilt. And try a new needle - I had one quilt that was hard to quilt, so I switched to a smaller needle. That helped a lot. And quilting on the bias is much easier than quilting on the straight of grain.

I was lucky enough to be in Joannes and they had full sized bamboo batts for 9.99 on clearance and I also had an additional 10 % off coupon. They only had 2 left but I grabbed both of them.