Cleaning and Preparing Textiles for Quilting
Lesson 3 from: Sewing Clothes into QuiltsBlair Stocker
Cleaning and Preparing Textiles for Quilting
Lesson 3 from: Sewing Clothes into QuiltsBlair Stocker
Lesson Info
3. Cleaning and Preparing Textiles for Quilting
Lessons
Every Quilt Has a Story
10:14 2Suitable Textiles for Quilting
05:59 3Cleaning and Preparing Textiles for Quilting
06:51 4Gear You Need to Make a Quilt
15:29 5Cutting into Clothes to Make Quilts
16:26 6Cutting the Squares
14:40 7Planning Your Quilt Design
06:17 8Sewing Squares into Rows
17:59Lesson Info
Cleaning and Preparing Textiles for Quilting
Let's talk about cleaning so I have a couple of I get really geeky about textile science because I studied in college and I really love it and then when I worked in a peril industry I had tio approve lab dips in color so I have a special place in my heart for this sort of thing but what I think if you've got vintage or old fabrics or things that you're not sure what the fiber content is like those swatches somewhere wool somewhere or line I mean I didn't know what the swatches were I really think you should wash them as you would wash the quill so if I were going to make a quilt out of those coat linings that I showed you, I would probably think about how with the final kobe our final quilty wash would it be dry cleaned or would it be washed on gentle and I would probably tried tio wash them together on the gentle cycle and maybe line dry because if they don't play well together you don't want him in a quilt so sometimes that means that you lose something so you have to be willing tio ...
either accept that as a possibility or maybe do some more detailed testing and maybe wash little swatches of it together and see what happens but like with the with the swatches from the sales and samples I because they were all pink tw around the edges, a little zigzag edges, I could just rip him off the cards. I put them in lingerie bags, and then I washed them. They smelled awful, they smell they had that mill dui, a g smell, and so that leads me to my two favorite products to wash in vintage things, and and I actually wash those in retro clean, which you can buy anywhere, and I think I don't know if you can buy the big box craft store, but you could certainly get it just about anywhere online, and it is made tio to soak the the key to any vintage fabric is exposure time to the cleaning process, so these particular products that I'm talking about are meant to hold that fabric for a while, so I think you could even soak something and retro clean overnight it's not going to hurt it, whereas if he were to soak something in bleach, it just eats the fibers, so you don't want to do that. These are both meant for cleaning the stains and the smells, but not the actual doesn't attack the fibers just a text, the bad guys in the five or so so I clean those swatches and retro clean in my washing machine, and then I actually dried them. In the dryer because I wasn't sure how I was going to find a clothes line small enough to hang all of the little swatches on and they did fine. And so what you have now is a quilt that you could wash in the washing machine. I think quote should be washed seasonally especially if they're used and we use all of our quilt so if it were going to be used for a wall hanging or something like that, you may not need to worry so much about how it would be clean. Maybe you could dry clean it, you know, once a year or something and then back out is a liquid it's no it's really good it's got a really clean smells ebay ever used any of that so it's totally natural it has enzymes that actually attack the smell and the mildew. So I've purchased quilt tops on ebay that looked great in the picture and you get him and the whole house just reeks of, you know, really mill dui smell and I saturated with back out I leave it overnight it's okay, if it dries on there and you wash it and the smell is completely gone, so both of these are really kind to vintage fabrics, but they will get it done. The other thing is color catchers are you guys familiar with these so you can get these at a grocery store in the laundry section and it's really just a piece of paper it's called a color catcher and I brought an example to show, so all of these squares were originally shirts that were going to sew with today. These were all watch together. I bought them at the thrift store, I wanted them to be in the same quilt, so I washed them all together and I put a color catcher in there, so they came out looking great. I was worried this one was clearly over died, so I was worried that that was going to bleed. I was worried I didn't know how this was going to do so these all came out beautifully, but this is the way the color catcher looked when I pulled it out, so it definitely picks up something in the wash water, and I recommend using just throwing one of these in there, and it will pick up all that straight die that's flying around, but and it's, you know, easy to use don't use bleach. I think I mentioned that before because bleach will just literally and, you know, I haven't actually had a lot of luck with oxygen, our chlorine free bleach, you could try it, but I just haven't had a lot of a lot of good results. Cleaning, I go back to my other ones all the time, the back out in the retro clean and then sunshine is like a natural disc infected it's. So, you know, so if you come by my house on a summer day, nine times out of ten, I will have something laying on a drive come my patio, because it brightens it. It cleans it. Those those printed tablecloth, it will not dull the color, something this we're just printed with some really good dies, so and it will get out odors, it's, just a natural deodorizer. But those things washing the quilt are washing the fabrics as you would the quilts really important and then following all these other things, you will be kind to your fabric, and it will hopefully clean up really well.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
a Creativelive Student
This class is a very basic class on making your first quilt out of square blocks. And on tieing a quilt. It is good on that level. She didn't go into much detail about how to work with different fabrics, advantages and disadvantages and different applications for say using jeans vs. linens vs. cotton. Or how to combine them so it does work. I did like that she wasn't from the quilting police and really encouraged us to try things. And to get stuff from Thrift stores, yards sales, etc.
Janelle Embree
I have been sewing for about 55 years and have made a few quilts. This class was better than I expected, in that it got me thinking about how I can use fabric scraps, fabric from my stash, and designer swatches I got from Fabmo in Sunnyvale!! The teacher had good ideas that you may not find in more traditional quilting classes. So not so perfectionistic and limiting. GO for it!