lindaschipper

ckcowl.....those are two lovely quilts. Wish I had half your talent!!

joe'smom

I've machine washed in both cool and warm water (gentle cycle), have air dried some outside when weather permits, machine dried others. I use Orvis soap. All of my fabric is pre-washed, and I usually pre-shrink my batting, too (not wool batting, though). I have not yet made a batik quilt with white background, but I would definitely add several color catchers in that case!

luvspaper

I prewash all fabrics but not batting. So it does crinkle/shrink up a very small amount, but the quilting is still very visible after washing the finished quilt. And often I am not using exactly matching thread color (hard to quilt that way).

cindi

Here's what mine looked like, before and after:
[ATTACH=CONFIG]555947[/ATTACH]

recycler

Your quilting is beautiful! Your example really shows the difference well!

feline fanatic

There are other factors that will affect the final look of the quilting after washing. Was the fabric prewashed and preshrunk? What kind of batting was used? Was the batting preshrunk? Was the washed quilt air dried flat by blocking, or line dried or put in the dryer?

All of these variables will affect the final look. If you used all prewashed fabrics and a polyester batting it will look pretty much the same before and after washing. But if the same quilt, quilted the exact same way using un prewashed, not preshrunk fabric and 100% cotton batting it will look very different.

hairquilt

My king size quilt that was professionally quilted started thread breaking after the 3rd wash. I think it was because of the finer thread used. Washed on gentle and line dried. Hoping to requilt the worst areas!

mac

How do you preshrink the batting?

feline fanatic

This Blog posting by Sue Garman explains it.

http://suegarman.blogspot.com/2013_03_01_archive.html

mac

Thanks, FF, that was a great post. I never in my wildest dream thought you could preshrink batting. She also had a lot of great hints in that blog. I am going to have to keep her blog and see what she is up to from now on.