ridiculous shrinkage - what am I doing wrong?
Before I started this quilt, I did NOT pre-wash the fabric. My cousin, a long time quilter made me promise not to. I DID however pre-shrink the batting (got it soaking wet, pushed out as much water as I could then put it in a warm dryer)
The quilt started out 96" x 96" I admit that when I initially put it on the bed, I didn't measure it to know how much it "shrunk" from the quilting.
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Now that it's been washed (I needed to get the remaining blue lines out) - the seams sit in a different spot on the bed, so I did measure it. 89" on the one side, I didn't measure the other side.
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That's roughly 8% shrinkage. That's more than the 3% I expected from the batting even if it wasn't preshrunk.
Then I made a placemat with some of the left over fabrics and did not preshrink the batting. I quilted it, hated my quilting, ripped it all out, then quilted it again. I washed it to get the old needle holes out.
It went from 19.5" x 13.5" to 16.5" x 11.5" - roughly 18% shrinkage. (Previously, it had fit the laptop table it's sitting on)
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I do know that I can take these out of the dryer early and stretch and pin them back to their size, or close to it, like a show quilt, but I wanted to know if there was anything I could or should have done differently to minimize the shrinkage to begin with.