It’s time for yet another scrapbusting adventure! This time, I need batting for a project. I go through padding quite a lot, such as when Orville uniform kneepads. I still have all this leftover fabric scraps, too small for proper patchworks, surely they can be used for this.
They can, indeed. And don’t call me Shirley.
This is actually going to be pretty simple. I’ll take the big bag of scrap stuffing I made before and shred it even further. The last batch of stuffing was made by laying out all my scraps on a cutting mat and running my rotary cutter over them in tight lines.
This batch is made by taking the last batch and throwing it in the blender. The scrap shreds are fine enough not to get wound around the blender blades, so the only trick is making sure they don’t just get blown around when I turn the blender on. That’s done by making sure they’re wet.
After some trial and error, I’ve settled onto a method that seams to work pretty well. I toss a small handful of shredded scraps into the blender with a cup of water and pulse for a minute or two. The end result is a soggy mess of loose fiber. I toss the result into a strainer lined with cheesecloth. After I’ve done that several times and built up a decent load of wet batting, I squeeze as much of the water out as I can and set the whole thing out to dry.
This is, again, pretty slow going. When finished, though, I’ve got a decent stock of very fine material for the next step. Natural fiber obviously works a lot better than synthetic, the end result still has tiny little shreds of scrap polyester mixed into the actual batting.
To turn this mess into usable batting, I need to add some structure back in. I’m doing that with some light ironable interfacing. Toss the padding onto a piece of interfacing and apply heat. I did this while the shreds were still a little damp, which may have helped keep things from overheating.
The end result is definitely heavier than conventional batting and less regular in its thickness. I had to use the thickest needle I have to punch through the material at the end. Still, I think it worked pretty well for adding some padding to the final piece for this project.
