Yikes, I always prewash, especially as I mostly make the dolls we give away to very sick kids. I do it because I know in some cancer conditions a doll may have to be sterilized, so I want the dresses (clothes) to be pre-shrank. Now hearing that I have yet one more reason to DO IT FOR THE SICK KDIS. (Most with cancer)

Same here. I bought Dove unscented body wash recently. Opened it and, guess what? It has a scent.

When I looked at the ingredients on the back, 'fragrance' was listed as the last ingredient.

Where I come from, fragrance = scent. Making it the last ingredient doesn't change that!

I wash fabrics to get the sizing, smells and fumigation out of them as I have allergies that are triggered by that stuff.

However, I would wash fabric whether I had the allergies or not. Here's why:

Most quilt shops are in some kind of shopping center. The quilt shop may be spotlessly clean (at least the parts we see), but the other shops in the store may not be. Since most of the shops in a shopping center share walls, plumbing pipes, heat/AC venting and roofs, lots of unwanted critters from less than spotless shops have EASY access to the spotlessly clean shops.

So I wash fabrics when I bring them home. Unless I am going to use them right away, I fold them right out of the dryer and put them away. They are ironed right before I use them.

To kill varmints in the precuts, you can iron them. I have put them in a small lengere (don't know if that's spelled right) net bag and washed them on gentle without a problem. Also rinsed them in a vinegar solution, rinsed again, and put them in the dryer. I can't remember whether I took them out of the bag before they went into the dryer, though.

Of course the other shops tell you that they never had such things. That's good for business. But it doesn't make it true.

If an area has heat or A/C, it is not sealed. It has vents that little varmints can crawl through. It's like a highway for them.

I worked in 2 LQS for several years, we never found anything gross or even unusual in our fabrics. We had everything from Bali batiks to fabrics from China, Korea and Japan ...

NEW fabric (on bolts from the manuf) comes very tightly wrapped in plastic ... maybe there's a process unknown to us, but I don't think fabric could be "fumigated" before it enters the country ???

Could somebody explain how these items mice, twigs leaves droppings get into the fabric bolts please.

I always wash my fabric to remove chemicals. I'm alllergic to formaldhyde and must use chemical fee laundry soap.

I have always been a pre-washer. As soon as I get it home, clip all four corners with my pinking blade, wash, dry and put away, iron right before using. For my pre-cuts, I wash and rinse using my salad spinner, FQ's, I have the plastic storage bins for washing and rinsing. The pre-cuts and FQ's I press dry.

All I can say is, WOW!! I wash my fabrics most of the time but I think I'm going to be an 'all the time' after reading this.