Whether you are making a new quilt or preserving an antique one, you will enjoy creating new ideas or preserving the workmanship that was used to create it. You can enjoy the quilts daily by displaying them, but the fabrics also need a lot of care, otherwise the fabrics will deteriorate. 

Hanging the Quilt

Use a sleeve system to hang your quilt.  This does not pinch or pull the fabric unevenly at certain points. It is common knowledge that flannels tend to stretch very badly.  Even while stitching flannels, pin everything very well and when you press, just press down and hold.  Be careful that it does not pull out of shape.

Types

Flannel Quilting Fabric is popular with today’s quilt maker.  The range available is very wide and exciting.  There are bright colored prints, plaids, and theme fabrics available in flannel.  Flannel Quilting Fabric makes comfortable baby blankets, and it is often coordinated with children’s flannel.

Tips

Working with a Flannel Quilting Fabric needs care and patience.  First of all, before stitching, the flannel should be pre-washed, because it has a tendency to shrink at different percentages.  When you are buying the Flannel Quilting Fabric, check out the quality, because all flannel is not the same.  There are many thin varieties of the fabric, even in quilt shops, which you should avoid.  

If you buy poor quality Flannel Quilting Fabric, you might only realize it after washing off the sizing. Then you can use the distorted plaid only in a crazy quilt and it may not straighten out even after sewing.

Flannel Quilting Fabric is ideal for making soft, warm, wonderful and cuddly quilts, because it is thicker than any other fabric. But the pattern should be kept simple, because working complicated patterns on the fabric is not easy.  Patterns without bias edges or patterns with squares and rectangles are advisable.

New Trends 

Of course the quality of flannels has changed dramatically in the last few years.  Some new shops which store Flannel Quilting Fabric rarely pre-wash any flannels.  They also use Dye magnet during washing so that colors don’t bleed.  The extra shrinkage in flannels, gives them an old-fashioned look. 

The printed Flannel Quilting Fabric is stiffer and does not fray as much as the woven flannel.  When you are running your Flannel Quilting Fabric through your sewing machine, it sheds a lot of lint.  Flannel is fuzzy and the lint piles up around the bobbin and the feed dogs, and even around the top of the presser and needle foot.  So you have to clean your sewing machine often.

With a large variety of colors available in the Flannel Quilting Fabric, the choice of fabrics has grown.  Just make sure that you choose the right quality, otherwise all the hard work that you put in into making the quilt will just be wasted.
 

Tags: Flannel Quilting Fabric, Quilting, Quilting Trends

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