I soon discovered that when using fabrics other than quilting cottons it's a good idea to do both.
About a month ago I purchased some Home Deco fabrics which I promptly washed but forgot to iron. Today I took one of those pieces of fabric to make a clutch cut it out and proceeded to iron it before adding my fusible interfacing and look what happened.
Yes it shrunk. LOLLLL
After ironing the whole piece it ended up smaller than the original one in the photo below.
I had to scrap the lot and go iron my fabric before cutting out the pieces again. So my advice is wash and iron any fabric that you suspect doesn't have much cotton in it. There is nothing worse than making up a nice bag and then have it shrink when you wash it.
I'll post photos of my clutch that I made with this fabric in the next couple of days.
~ Maria ~
There's another issue that has cropped up with me and the wash/don't wash question Maria. A couple of weeks ago I bought a new blouse at a very nice department store. Normally I wash anything I buy before wearing but this time I was in a hurry and wore it to a stitching group I was attending. I had a terrible allergic reaction to the dye! I thought I was just getting a really bad cold...my eyes burned and my nose ran and I was miserable. Fifteen minutes after I took that blouse off I was fine. It was cotton and came from India. Many of our quilting fabrics come from other countries so I guess I'll be washing all my fabric from now on! blessings, marlene
ReplyDeleteHi Maria. I have had home dec fabric shrink while I ironed it too and I didn't even wash it. Sometimes it's the unknown fabric content and a hot iron that makes it shrink up. At least we all learn from our mistakes, huh?
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