Another Wednesday, another episode of the Stop Scrolling, Start Sewing podcast.  Today we’re chatting all about Quilt Shop Quality Fabric and what makes it so fabulous!

If you’d rather read the episode, head over here.

Like anything, It starts at the foundation

Before fabric is dyed and rolled onto a bolt, it is plain raw woven cotton, called Greige Goods.  That’s Greige, pronounced Gray.  These grieve goods are what give fabric their drape, smoothness, and overall lush feeling.  This comes down to the staple of cotton that is used in creating the goods.  The longer the staple of cotton, the softer and stronger the fabric will be.  

Besides the staple length, there is also the thread count.  Similar to those lovely Egyptian cotton sheets on your bed, the higher the thread count, the better.  However, quilt cotton thread cotton is often expressed in terms of number of threads in a square inch, vertical by horizontal.  So instead of 4600 thread count, it would be 68 x 68.

Then it’s the printing process

Screen printing is the most prevalent way of printing designs on fabric.  But there are different ways and dyes that are used that can yield very different results.  Good screen printing has the design sink into the fabric in a way that makes it look like each feature was dyed onto the fabric.  Less expensive methods tend to leave the design resting on top of the fabric.  Almost like a very thin iron on.  This also can add to the stiffness that you may feel with certain types of fabric.

The finishing process

The icing on the cake for quilt shop quality fabrics is the finishing process.  Other quality levels typically skip this step all together.  But this is what keeps colors from running, and smooths the staple of the cotton.  While I instruct my students in the Modern Quilters Academy to always wash their discount retailer fabric, it isn’t quite necessary for quilt shop quality fabric.