Now that the Dear Jane quilt top is finally done, I’m embarking on the next phase of the project – sandwiching and quilting it. But first, I have to decide what batting to use. The next several posts will be about that rigorous scientific process.

My go-to batting is Mountain Mist Quilt-Light polyester batting, but it just feels wrong to use poly batting in this fancy heirloom-adjacent project, so I’m open to trying a new batting product.

But I also don’t want to commit to quilting this 7-foot square quilt without trying the batting out on a small scale first. So, I decided to make some small quilt tops (about 9″ square) that I could test with different types of batting.

Step 1 was figuring out what batting is available and suitable for hand quilters. I found a batting sampler pack that included some 12″ squares of various Hobbs batting, plus a card with little swatches of Quilters Dream batting.

But the batting sampler pack was perpetually out of stock, so instead, I bought the smallest size of each batting I could get my hands on, worked some sales, used some coupons, and got five Quilters Dream craft size (36″x45″) and three Hobbs Tuscany throw size (60″x60″) batts.

I figure I can use the leftover bits for small wall hangings, or give the ones I don’t like to my friend Marissa. She machine quilts, so she has a whole different set of criteria for batting.

Next I made the eight quiltlets (yes, I made up this word) shown above for my batting tests. Each one has 1/2″ sashing between the squares, the same as the Dear Jane quilt. The bottom left and bottom right squares feature a variety of green fabrics and light fabrics from the Dear Jane quilt. The top right square uses the backing fabric. The top left square is color-coded based on what kind of batting will be inside, so that I’ll be able to keep track of which is which after sandwiching.

Once I got the eight quiltlets sewn together (by machine, because let’s be realistic), I cut out all the backing pieces and batting pieces in one night. I safety-pin-basted as I went, so I would make sure to keep the right battings with the right color-coded quiltlets.

Preliminary results, based on cutting and pin-basting alone? The frontrunners are Hobbs Tuscany Wool and Quilters Dream Green.

I’ll be brutally honest with you – I didn’t think I was going to like wool batting at all. Just the fact that the package was three times the thickness of the same size cotton, bamboo, or poly batting made me nervous.

But once I wrestled it out of the package, it had an almost lacy translucent look; it was the closest of all to my beloved Mountain Mist Quilt-Light poly batting. Go figure.

And everyone kept telling me that wool quilted like butter … based on how the safety pins slid through it, I’m suddenly pro-wool.

Cotton, on the other hand, was a disappointment. For being so thin, it was surprisingly difficult to pin through. And everywhere I cut, I left behind a little stripe of cotton fuzz embedded in my cutting mat. I didn’t notice exactly when that started, but the two thicknesses of Quilters Dream Cotton were the only two squares that I literally had to peel away from the mat.

The Tuscany cotton was a little easier to pin through than the two Quilters Dream cotton samples, but it’s still not something I’m enthusiastic about so far. The Tuscany cotton-wool blend was somewhere in the middle, as expected.

The Tuscany samples seemed to be a higher quality than the Quilters Dream (or maybe it was just that they used the dregs of the roll to cut out the Dream craft-size batts, and the throw-size ones from Hobbs were a nicer cut … it’s like cuts of beef, right?). Many of the Dream ones were not cut very square … the bamboo sample has a vestigial tail of batting dangling out of the quilt sandwich.

The Quilters Dream Wool was much fluffier and not as soft-feeling as the Hobbs Tuscany. More like what I thought wool was going to be when I pre-decided I wasn’t going to like wool.

The Quilters Dream Bamboo was a long shot, but it was not too expensive for the craft size, and I wanted to try it out. So far, it seems suspiciously like the Quilters Dream cotton samples.

The final sample, for Quilters Dream Green, is probably not something I will use for the Dear Jane, but I wanted to try it out to see if it could be a non-heirloom replacement for my beloved-but-increasingly-hard-to-find Mountain Mist Quilt-Light.

It was the squarest of all the Quilters Dream samples, and it both cut and pinned easily. And I love that it saves plastic bottles from the landfill. We’ll see how it does in the remaining tests, but it could be a winner for future non-heirloom quilts.

There’s even a non-zero chance I’ll use it for the Dear Jane … once it’s inside the quilt, who’s going to know?