Video:Quilting Fabrics

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Transcript:Quilting Fabrics

Hi, I'm Becki Stratton, for About.com. I'm going to share three types of fabrics that are used in quilting.

Types of Quilting Fabric

The first one is a cotton fabric. The second is flannel. Flannel is very warm and cozy and it's great for pajama bottoms and warm winter quilts. And the third is a batik. Cotton and batik can be used in any kind of quilt, and can also be used in clothing, jackets, pajama bottoms, bags - anything that you can think of. Quilt shop fabric has a higher thread count. You want to make sure that your quality is good.

Quilt Fabric Selvage

Let's take a look at the selvage. Selvage is the part of the fabric that has writing, maybe a little white, it might have pinholes, it may be frayed - and on batiks, it may be hard sometimes to see it. You want to not use that in your quilt. The selvage is your lengthwise grain. So particularly if you're making clothing, you want your pieces of patterns to run lengthwise grain. The crosswise grain runs from selvage to selvage.

Preparing Quilt Fabric

Fabric preparation depends on the quilter. Some quilters choose to prewash their fabric. It makes the fabric softer and takes out the sizing. Other people choose not to wash. If you choose to prewash, wash all of your fabric - and if you are not going to wash, have all fabrics that are not washed. That way, they will shrink at the same rate. If a quilt fabric is bleeding, it could ruin your quilt - particularly if you have light and dark color contrast.

We're going to test this piece of fabric. Rinse it in hot water and squeeze it or swish it around, and we can see that there's a lot of color coming off of this fabric. We want to make sure we really wash this well.

How to Keep Quilt Fabric from Fraying

If you need to keep your fabric from fraying, there are three ways that you can do that. One is to do a zigzag stitch along the edge of your fabric. The second is to do a straight stitch about an eighth of an inch in. The third way is to serge the edges with a serger, which is another kind of sewing machine that does finished edges. Thank you for watching. To learn more, visit us on the Web at About.com.