44"-45" Inch Fabric Not Measuring Up
 

One of my guild's community service projects this year is blankets for vets. The criteria is they MUST be 45" square. OK, I found some really nice fabric at my local quilt shop that I thought a vet would really like, green with pretty gold medallions, so I bought enough to make 2 lap quilts.

Well, guess what. The fabric measures 43", not even 44", and it's 42-1/4" if you eliminate the narrow white strip running down the width of the fabric. Now I'm sure I can fudge a little on the lap quilt, but when I'm paying good money for quality fabric, and the description says 44"-45", I think it should "measure up". Don't you?

I believe cotton fabric 'averages' 42-44 inches and not 45 exactly. Guess it depends on the manufacturer even with the 42-44 inches.

Most of the most recent fabrics are only 42-44 inches wide. I think the pattern is older and needs to be changed since fabric has become smaller.

I noticed quite a while ago that fabric seems to have gotten narrower. And also that some of the higher end manufacturers are making their selvedges really waide... like really wide. Ick!

Nowdays it is rare to get a fabric that has more than 42" of usable width of fabric. If you truly need 45" you may need to add a border to get up to that size.

I think 42" - 43" is the industry standard nowadays.

i've seen plenty of 40" fabrics on the shelves too- it is important to read the end of the bolt which tells you the width of the fabric, the thread count and the fiber content, the manufacturer---holds more information than simply a price-

I am sure there are many factors which effect the width of fabric, especialy the origin of it manuifacture, quality of the cotton, number of pases through the dying/printing process. Some years ago I asked a friend who designed about the width because her fabric was coming thru at 40" as well as 41, 42 etc. She said they only assure the fabric is at least 40". If you measure all the pieces in a single line of fabric, you will find differences in the width. It depends on where the piece was manufactured. At one time the simpler patterns were produced in the USA while the more detailed from overseas.
Knowing the fabric has become more important now a days than ever before Read the label/end of the bolt and buy/work accordingly. I have even found some at 39". One just must account for this difference.

And besides being woven narrower, I've recently found that the shrinkage seems to be WOF only, sometimes more than 2". The length of fabric doesn't seem to shrink at all.