As a garment maker, I always hated washing and ironing my fabrics before diving into my projects. My momentum would stall, so to speak. But if I wanted that outfit to fit, pre-washing was necessary.
Now that I quilt, I have learned not to prewash because the sizing in the fabric helps with accuracy of cutting and piecing. And then I got to thinking about the Prewash/non-prewash debate. Consider the clothes that we buy at the store. That fabric is not prewashed prior to garment construction. The first thing that we do when we get new clothes home is put them in the wash. When we buy clothes, we usually look at the fiber content to see if the clothes will shrink during the first wash and select the size according to that. Maybe that's how we need to approach quilting. We know the fabric will shrink, but do we allow for that by adding an extra row or border?