Originally Posted by
Tartan
Buy the best quality fabric you can afford wherever you find it. I am glad I have a good stash to work from because affordable fabric is getting harder to find. Bonnie Hunter uses second hand cotton shirt fabrics for a lot of her quilts. She is the sought after quilt teacher from www.quiltville.com. She's not paying attention to the quilt police.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York featured the Gees Bend Quilts and pronounced them masterpieces. I guarantee that the ladies creating those quilts had never entered a LQS, much less bought fabric there.
Making quilts out of "bought" fabric prior to the 50's (and even then sometimes) was unheard of except for the very rich. Feedsacks were just that, they had flour, meal, and chicken feed in them at the store. Anything that was still usable was used to make the quilts. Even the "crazy" quilt kits of satin and lace were bought as a large bundle of scraps from sewing factories.