Sew Expo 2

I got one other amazing thing at Sew Expo!  I forgot, and it's the one thing I'm MOST excited about.  Please don't judge me for being so excited about this, though... the spend-thrift in me is thrilled to the core about this!  It's this fusible stuff that fuses small pieces of batting together super-fast and super-strong so the piece created can be used inside of another quilt.  (Here is the company's website.)  So, you know, all those annoying edges around a large piece of batting that I am forced to cut off because my quilt is smaller?  ALL BETTER because I can just fuse it to another piece, and TA-DA!  Into another quilt it goes!

I used to spend lots of time sewing these pieces together, and let me say, fusing is the way to go -- but it's totally a "Why the hell didn't I think of this?" idea... I was so excited that on Sunday of last weekend (you know, the day after I'd bought the stuff) I spent a short hour and half fusing batting pieces together and getting straight-up organized.

I learned a couple things while I was doing it...and who knows?  There's probably a handy-dandy tutorial on their website that says all of this stuff, but I didn't find it before I went to town fusing away:

1.  The spot where the batting abuts doesn't have to straight, just exactly the same...

So I got around this by laying the batting pieces on top of each other, and cutting through both layers.

Then, I pulled out the little pieces from under each, and the batting matched up exactly.

2.  It is REALLY sticky.

It seems to have the consistency of fusible interfacing you'd use on clothes, as opposed to double-sided fusible interfacing for applique on quilts.  Nevertheless, it's fusible, so I used my scungy iron.  I love this iron.  I wish it wasn't so scungy -- I'd still be using it as my 'daily driver'...but as you can see, it's seen better days...you can see my new daily-driver iron in the back...

And after a short while, my stack of "this is too big to throw away" batting scraps went from a mess to an organized stack of labeled, usable pieces!!

Before

After

I'm off to sew again for at least a little while...I've got lots of batting to quilt up, don't ya know??