best way to cut 240 ft of batting - 1 1/8" wide please help!
 

Hello,

I am looking for suggestions on the best way to cut roughly 250+ ft of batting at a time. The batting is 1/4" loft and the strips are 1 1/8" wide. I have been cutting roughly 4 ft long strips but the length is not really critical. Is there a batting manufacturer that could do something like this?

I have been using a rotary cutter, but this takes quite a while to do...

FWIW, I am not a quilter, but I was advised by others to check out this group since if there is any place that would have an answer to my dilemma, it would be here.

thank you in advance,
DW

what are you making with the 1 1/8". width, maybe there is an alternative?

wow--i really don't have any other suggestions than what you are doing. But have to ask--what are you doing with 250+ft of 1 1/8" wide bat? Because if you are using the bat as a stablizer or like a piping in something, there may be a better product out there. Also, have you contacted a bat manufacturer so see what the expense would be to have something like this made up? It's possible that Hobbs, Warm & Natural, Winline, etc make a similar product for a different application--certainly worth checking.

I prefer to mark the batting with Clover Chaco Liner (blue) then cut
with scissors. Cutting all those strips won't be easy for sure. Get
someone to help you or take lots of breaks to avoid permanent
wrist injuries.

With such a low loft, I think you could use electric scissors. Check Amazon. I would probably try using them along with a long (4 foot or so) metal rule from a big box store. If you have a large flat surface, I think you could use the metal rule as a guide for the electric scissors.

Do you have a serger? Or could you borrow one? Remove the needle and thread, but leave the cutting blade in place. Depending on how accurate the strips need to be, you might not even need to mark the batting. You might be able to place a piece of carpenter's tape on the bed of the serger and mark a line on the tape 1-1/8" to the right of the cutting blade. I don't have my serger out, or I would take a closer look. Come to think of it, the tape might need to go on the face of the serger. I think I have actually done that in the past when I had to trim yards of draperies to fit some windows.

Upon thinking a little more about the electric scissors, I think the easiest way to use one would be to fasten it somehow to the edge of a table so that the cutting blades are 1-1/8" from the table edge. By keeping the scissors stationary, you could feed the batting to the scissors using the table's edge as your guide.

Neither an electric scissors nor a serger will be quite as accurate as rotary cutting, but both would be a lot faster and both would save your hands from a lot of stress.

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

I think you are on the right track clamping the batting then using a rotary cutter to cut. A tight clamp using the large metal ruler from Lowe's or Home Depot, then the largest rotary cutter I could find to cut the batt.

DW, talk with a rep from the band saw company. There may be a saw blade that would work better. You know they use band saws for all kinds of cutting. There could be a blade that would do what you need, which is to cut, not shred.

bkay