On Prewashing...

In the quilting world there is often the question of prewashing... to do it, or not. Myself, I have always been a prewasher. More than anything else, I just prefer to work with the softer fabrics, after taking out manufacturer sizing, other chemicals, dust, grime, and forcing the woven fabrics to forget how they might have been stretched and folded onto a bolt.

That said, I do usually try to wash with like colors. Ingrained instruction, I suppose. But every once in a while you not only need to get working on those new pieces you just picked up in order to fill in a project already in process, but it can be hard to justify running a whole wash cycle with the equivalent of 2 yards of fabric just because I don't have any dirty laundry to throw in and I want to keep those intense darks separate. So, this weekend I threw caution to the wind.

These days, with the finer quilting fabric manufacturers, dye transfer is hardly an issue. I was a BIT concerned about that deep teal Moda Marble and the light pinks coming into contact, but it would seem my fears were undue. Had there been a batik in the mix, I probably WOULD have run separate loads, but this was a good experiment for me, with thankfully good results. And allowed me to move forward on that teal quilt without much of a hiccup.