My Rainbow Quilt Got Frankenstein-y

So I've been slowly working on my Rainbow Quilt-As-You-Go quilt and it's definitely been having an effect on my scrap situation.  Unfortunately, my fabric scraps are still plentiful, but my batting scraps have started to come up a bit short. (Sorry, had to.)

It's only $3 on Amazon, but still feels like cheating.

The solution is simple, batting tape, available everywhere and made just for the purpose of piecing together batting.  But I really wanted this to be a quilt that was totally from what I already have, and I don't have batting tape.

So I decided to improvise.  Make my own kind of batting tape!  With fabric, pins, and a machine, all the things that I totally have in my sewing room.  Want to learn my sneaky trick?

I found two pieces of batting that would add up to my 12.5" block, and made sure the sides were mostly flat where I wanted to join them.

Then I sewed my strip of fabric to one side, about a half inch in from the join.  (Of course, habit took over and I sewed right sides together and flipped it over, which is why you only see one line of stitching.  Really don't have to do that, I blame muscle memory!)

The only nail bite-y bit was making sure that there was just enough tension on the batting so that when I sewed the second line, there wouldn't be a gap in the batting.

Then I did my quilting perpendicular to the join, so that each line of stitching is kind of like a bandaid holding those two sides together.

Then I added all the rest of my pieces like normal.  I did have to attach them in rows, so I did a little  stitch in the ditch to get some horizontal quilting on that big pieced chunk in the middle.

You can hardly tell where the join is! (Except for that tiny gap at the top, but I'm betting shrinkage will take  care of that bit.)

I still have about six more blocks to make, but I should be able to do that with my scraps.  And I can try different ways to layout the scraps so that I don't have six blocks that are all rows.

Linking up with Live a Colorful Life for Really Random Thursday!