If you quilt, or play baseball, you may have an idea of what a batt/bat is. In baseball, it is long piece of wood used to bean people who make you angry. In quilting, batting is the layer of filling between the top and bottom layers of the quilt. Wikipedia tells me that batting is also used in those little Christmas town displays as the snow. Random.

This is batting that you put in a layer in the middle of the quilt sandwich.

For spinners, a batt is the long rectangle of organized fiber that comes off a drum carder. Spinners generally divide a batt into long strips of fiber called roving because roving is much easier to handle as you spin (see my post here on how that’s done).

Each batt weighs about 2 ounces.

What fascinates me is the connection between the batts I use to spin and the batting that quilters use. Back before synthetic batting came along, they were actually the same thing. Quilters, the original “up-cyclers”, sewed together all their thin scraps of waste fabric to make beautiful designs, and then sandwiched a layer of the sub-par wool between two layers of fabric to give the quilt warmth. What would otherwise have been discarded, fabric in unusual or too-small sizes and wool that was not soft, is given new life as something beautiful and useful.

Note: I was out-of-town Mon-Wed, sorry, I should have given you a heads up.