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Comment by the rogue quilter on June 22, 2012 at 12:17pm

i had a brainstorm, or brainfart as dh is wont to call some of my little bright ideas! lollol...after moving into oir new, to us, home. not 1870's farmhouse..he didn't want me to go to work as we had been apart for most of the preceeding 14yrs while i raised our son (who would then be able to attend just one school...he was one of "those kids") amd dh followed the job carrot that his company dangled to jobs on the oppisite side of the continent. anyway dh wanted me to forgo my delightfully anticipated return to work..with the plea..we have been apart..now we are together and we even have weekends together!.. ok...not yet knowing that we had moved into a bigger mess/repair/etc than we had left, i whimsically went and bought a poorly matched set of remnants from the one little quilt shop that was still in business at that time' they were 50% off! they were pretty & pretty ugly. THE PLAN: cut each one in half, send one half to my quilt chat freind in holland. and she would choose a pattern, we both do minis as well as wall, polly has never done bed size. so this was an ideal project to fill what i, in my vast sillyness, expected to be long blissfully filled dark northern winter hours of quilting. whoohoo!

not to be...but that is another story :(

one of the fabs was a lovely red wine solid. i prewash, polly does not.

not sure how many times i rinsed that fab...cold water, vinegar, salt...all the tricks. it still ran, only a bit, but there was red on the white towel that i use to test for bleeding. i used it. told polly... she said oh dear! i said well, we just know that we can never wash our pretties. i live in wide open windstorm duststorm region of steppsage area of the "evergreen state of washington", she, few minutes out of amsterdam with lovely view of, and mostly down wind of, the amsterdamn airport from her flat in wormer. so...i figure we can always use the old method of hanging out and beating the dust out of our pretties like they did with some household furnishings while living on the 19th century american prarie if they get a little grody lookin' lollol...

like viki and riana have found...if it bleeds...it is gonna bleed..the tricks do not work on serious bleeders. oh well....

Comment by Riana Noyes on June 22, 2012 at 8:45am

 My grandson's "hockey" quilt I made him with a blue sheeting back  (prewashed)bled through on it's first washing, and my daughter called me in tears. Blue had seeped through the handstitchinglines and blotches were throughout. I told her to wash again before drying. She ended up doing this 3 times. The quilt is now not blue & white as intended, but blue & pale blue.Doesn't look like when I made it, but the blotching is gone, it has and my grandson still loves it.(photo in my gallery).The quilt is over 2 yr. old and has stopped letting off colour.

Comment by viki hagan on June 22, 2012 at 1:35am

I've noticed that if a fabric bleeds onto my hands from handling it for just a few minutes.. it's never going to stop doing that. I bought a beautiful blue once that I wanted to use in a quilt for my ex, but it got blue on my hands, washed it every way possible until it was too faded to use in a quilt.. so I made scrubs out of it.. for the next year, every time I wore them they turned my legs blue, lol. I still don't prewash anything, but I do run my hands over it several times and if my hands change colors, scrubs it is.

Comment by the rogue quilter on June 21, 2012 at 5:59pm

my friends younger brother bought a beautiful pair of shorts made from madras plaids. i had had experience with this fab as my older brother brought me some fr his tour of duty in se asia (he also brought my sisters and i japanese silk brocade kimono fabric fr japan)

he told me to be careful...it faded. well..it did..never made a thing with it. so friend and i worked w little brothers shorts...cold salt water soak and rinse...vinegar...i went home. she continued soaking rinsing changing amounts of time, salt or vinegar concentration...they never stopped fadding...just as my fab had behaved years before. a woman in local group had some really cute car print fab that she had gotten at joanns and was amazed at the blue on her hands...she is not a believer in the prewash theory. amazes me...i wash every thing that i use that is washable...remove over dye & chemicals such as sizing that has embalming fluid elements in it. that blue continued to fade even after salt water ...then vinegar wash. so now i prewwash with cold water, light detergent wash, gentle cycle then a couple of cold water rinse..again, gentle cycle... till water is clear. most fabs only need one treatment. but some dark rich colors need several. i am collecting some small amts of batiks for idea i have ...but have not washed them yet. most of the members in one of the quilt groups i belong to use batic almost exclusively.....have never heard any issues discussed as to wax removal, or difficulty with bleeding after initial prewash.

Comment by viki hagan on June 21, 2012 at 5:44pm

A cold vinegar wash supposedly helps 'set' the dye, it's never worked for me though. Your other option is to pick up some color catchers and wash the fabric a few times with those or use them when you wash the quilt. I know Joanne's also carries a commercial product that I can't remember the name of right now, which is also supposed to help set the dyes.

Comment by Karen Newman Brown on June 21, 2012 at 2:47pm

I also have a batik quilt I am going to make and am hasseling with how to wash the fabrics so the color is set.  Years ago they said to rinse it in salt water to set it.  Have you heard anything about that? Also, are using washing each of you pieces of fabric separately?

Comment by Riana Noyes on June 10, 2012 at 9:21am

I wash ALL fabrics that go into my quilts (I don't use unwashables) because even the good ones can bleed, surprisingly. You'll love how the batik feels after washing. I always love the body that batik possesses.

Comment by the rogue quilter on June 9, 2012 at 2:49pm

same here. not a big fan of batiks, but love them and have bought a few that wouldwork with other fabs in my stash, or that dh said i just had! to have. but i can descern no front or back even tho at a recent meet a member tried to show me how she had reversed the fab in one square, she was so upset. i also have not felt the wax..and i would think that that is rinsed out after the fab comes out of its "bath" at time of printing. i plan to research thos as i find it interesting. in the earlierncenturies of commercial fabric printing it was done with a similar dye resist method as the batiks are done with. tho i have some quilts and fabrics from mid to late 1800s and some of them are very stiff, i havenput it down to the fact that then, as now there were diff qualities of fab available.

Comment by viki hagan on June 8, 2012 at 9:55pm

Carol I have never heard such a thing either.. I do always wash my batiks though, not to get wax out but to get out the excess dye that the deeper colors very often have. I'm very handsy when choosing my fabrics, I have to like they way they feel as much as they way they look and I dare say that would be something textural you could feel, the waxy bits would be smoother or something I'd think. Also, I've never really noticed a batik having a front/back.. every single one I've ever purchased was exactly the same on both sides, which is kind of the point of using wax to make the designs, it soaks all they way through just like the dye. That's kind of the whole point of batiks, I thought.

Perhaps they were talking about hand dyed batiks, rather than commercially produced?