In Praise of Cheap Fabric

After reading the reactions to Part I of my baby quilt primer, I'm inspired to leap to the defense of cheap fabric. Several commenters were surprised by my use of lower-grade material, and thought I was doing new quilters a disservice not to discourage them from using premium fabric.

Those objections represent the majority opinion in the serious quilting community, and I respect that. But, friends, I am here today to deliver the minority report.

Here goes.

The first objection, from Linda, was that new quilters would be turned off by "the frustrations of working with the cheap crap." This confused me for a while, because for simple straight-stitch pieceing, the cheap crap doesn't really handle any differently than the expensive crap. Does it? But I'm wondering if we might have a definitional problem confusing the issue. Let's talk about three categories of fabric:

• Premium Fabric. Typically has a nice high threat count from good cotton fiber, tending towards better dyeing and fastness of color, generally sold at specialty quilt shops for $9 to $12 per yard.
  
• Discount Fabric. Lower threat count, often somewhat "loose" after a coating of starch is dissolved during the initial washing. Wide range of dye quality. Generally sold at, um, chain craft outlets for, on average, $2 to $3 per yard.
  
• Salvage. Stuff that's not 100% cotton. Stuff that used to be sheets or clothing. Stuff that is stretchy or limp or smells like your grandma's house in 1972 when you iron it. Generally found at thrift shops or in boxes at the side of the road that say "free," or cut out of clothes, or handed to you in a garbage bag by a well meaning person who asks "Don't you sew or something?"

Now then. My experience is that Salvage fabric can be, yes, very frustrating to work with. (I must mention in passing, though, that my buddy Sara whupped out her first quilt from, if I recall correctly, upholstery samples, quickly and with gleeful abandon. But she's a can-do sorta girl.) Discount fabric can be harder to deal with than premium if you are working on the bias, or if you are doing applique with small pieces. But for good old cut-out-squares-and-sew-them-back-together pieceing, again, I've never noticed it handling any differently from Premium fabric. I don't think a newbie would either.

Jeanne (whom I can't find a link to, sorry) pointed out that Premium fabric is more durable in the long run, and there's no doubt about it. It's 100% true. Absolutely. But the point is also easily overstated, I think; Discount fabric is not the flimsy tissue it is often made out to be. For my first decade or so of quilting, I used discount fabrics almost exclusively. Many of those pieces are now ten to fifteen years old, and to my knowledge none of them have any serious structural issues. My first blanket-sized quilt has been in practical use on my bed every day for 12 years now, and it's fine. The first child's quilt I made saw constant use by a toddler who grew up, as they do, and is now in junior high, and it's been handed down to little sister now. It has a huge ink stain on it from an unfortunate incident along the way, but the fabric is completely intact. It has lasted longer than it needed to!


In Praise of Premium Fabric

Now the truth is, although I still have acres of Discount fabric in the stash, I almost never buy it anymore. When I buy fabric now, I go the Premium route. There are excellent reasons to buy Premium fabric; here are my Top Four in increasing order of importance.

#4 - The durability is better over longer time spans.

#3 - The color fastness is often, although not always, better.

#2 - When you buy Premium, you support the quilt shops that are the hubs of the community.

#1 - Premium fabrics are, typically, on average, more beautiful. Obviously, that matters. For a serious artistic project, they are the obvious choice if you can afford them.


In Praise of Discount Fabric

But having said that, I really resist the idea of telling a new quilter that Premium is the only way to go. Because it's not that Premium fabric is, like most products, 20% or 50% or 100% more expensive than the Discount equivalent. It's usually 400% to 500% more! That kind of price differential makes using Premium fabric a very, very expensive way to make all of the mistakes you are going to make, and to work through those first naive design ideas you are going to come up with, when you are first starting out.

The thing is, if Discount fabric is off-limits the craft becomes strictly the domain of the well-off. The reason that I only used Discount fabrics for so long, after all, is that they were simply all I could afford, and I have never been anything resembling truly poor. Even at that, and even at the Discount price, my finished tops used to wait sometimes for Christmas gift certificates so I could afford backing fabric for them.

The only reason I can buy Premium fabric now is that I've reached enough of a level of mid-life affluence that I have extra money to throw at my hobby. I buy it because I CAN. If I had played my cards differently, though -- if I had wanted to have children, for instance -- I seriously doubt I could afford the good stuff now. But I would still want to make an occasional quilt.


In Praise of Salvage Fabric

Even though I can afford Premium fabric now, I still don't see the point of making utility quilts from it. For utility quilts (and remember, I consider a working crib quilt to be a utility item) I like to reach back to the practical origins of pieceing. I like the challenge of making do with what is on hand, imitating -- albeit in great comfort and without the desperation of necessity -- the way that earlier quilters made practical use of available scraps during the many centuries when fabric was a precious commodity.

Times have changed, of course. The drunk who once staggered into my mom's quilt class to announce "these are the ladies who cut cloth apart and then sew it back together!" was not the only person to notice that modern decorative quilting has strayed a long way from its practical roots. Well, that's fine. But I get a great deal of satisfaction out of finding use for the Salvage fabric that washes up on my shores. It's kind of a fun game, trying to keep it out of the landfill by doing something useful and attractive with it. That's what the QuiltStorm project (stay tuned!) is going to be all about, and that is why, in the next post, you will see me use an old flannel sheet that I found on the sidewalk as the back for my highly scrappy crib quilt.

And yes, that's a highly SCRAPPY crib quilt. With an "S." It looks great! If I do say so myself! It is by no means archival, but I betcha it will stay in one piece longer than the baby will stay a baby, which is as long as it needs to. It's comfy and cozy and warm! And the total materials cost, fabric, batting, and thread, was: FREE. 100% scrap and salvage.