Me again!
I'm starting to look at fabric's for my husband's lap quilt (a grey and blue "winding ways") and thought I had found the perfect fabric for it, Kaffe Fassett's "colour shot" aka "shot cotton". Problem is I've heard back from 2 different retailers that the fabric is thinner than most quilting cottons and is simillar in weight to indian cotton.
I've used indian cotton in some costuming I've done and I'm realy leery of trying to quilt it. It's very lightweight, loosly woven and amoung other things I worry that the batting might show through.
Has anybody quilted indian cotton, did it work, will it hold up to being a lap quilt for a husband who generaly has a cat on his lap?
Zoo

I haven't used India cotton, so can't comment specifically on that. However, what I would do in your situation is purchase tricot knit fusible interfacing. Fusing the tricot to the back of your fabric will give it body and prevent batting from peeking through. This is a technique that is helpful when working with old silk neckties.

I have found that fusible tricot is much less expensive when purchased from an online drapery company rather than regular fabric sites. The site I used is http://www.bblackandsons.com . The tricot comes in beige and black, as I recall. I purchased a yard of fusible tricot from our local JoAnn's Fabric to compare, and I actually liked the one from Black and Sons better.

If you decide to use tricot fusible, it's a good idea to preshrink the fusible by holding a steam iron a couple of inches above it. After it has cooled, you can either lay your fabric on it or lay the fusible on your fabric to fuse the two together. Just make sure the glue side of the fusible is next to the wrong side of your fabric!

The advantages of using fusible tricot are: it is light in weight so doesn't change the hand of the fabric too much, it has stretch so doesn't make the fabric overly stiff, and I find it fairly easy to work with. It is great for giving substance to fabrics that would otherwise be too lightweight to use in quilts.

Mary

what she said. :wink:

Thanks, that's great advice!

When I did garment sewing (that was before my bod took on a matronly look :lol: ), I used the tricot interfacing on all kinds of fabrics. It worked very well on cottons.