I haven't found the "mess" to be so horrible that it takes but a minute or two after taking it out of the washing machine to snip.

But then, I don't use my dryer very often....I suppose that helps.

quiltingcandy, I use the rotary cutter pinking blade and it works like a charm. Just bought another blade as a backup as those can't be sharpened. Have also tried the chopping off the corner but didn't find that worked as well. I don't wash my fabrics before I use them anyway but I do dunk them into starch and press before cutting.

I wash on the gentle cycle and dry on low. I also clip the opposite corners.

That's what I do....just throw it in the washer and deal with what comes out!

I baste across the raw edges.

I mostly soak mine, use hot water and very little soap, agitate to stir the soap around, soak 15-20 then spin, refill barely agitate and spin, it doesn't really happen in the dryer so I just let it go. Still have some tangles but not as many. I mostly use this when washing several pieces together and I never do anything smaller than a yard.

I am a serger. It really takes very little time...and if you are dealing with yardage (like backings etc) the 30 seconds it takes to serge WAAAY out weights the time it would take me to press 3+ yards. I also wash after 2 incidents with fabrics that bled and Bled and BLED after I made a quilt with them. Washing is easy for me after all that heart ache. Ya do what ya need to do!

I have always washed the fabrics on the gentle cycle and have not had a lot of tangles.

I use a narrow, long-stitch length zig-zag stitch or overcast the edges with a long,narrow stitch.

I used to lose up up to an inch of fabric on each end on some fabrics if it had been cut wonky or was loosely woven. The overcast stitching is fairly easy to remove if one wants to keep and use every smidgen of fabric purchased.

Maybe someone can explain -

What I really do not understand - if someone feels a three yard piece of fabric should be washed - what is different about the fabric characteristics of a fat-eighth that would make it not necessary to be washed?

I have had a scrap do damage because I thought "Oh, this came from a LQS, so I will be lazy about it, and think it will be okay." It wasn't.

Now I soak the pieces in hot water (in a bucket, the sink, a kettle - whatever) and then wash in the machine on a short, gentle cycle.

I feel that it is the agitation of washing and drying that makes a fabric look "used" - so I try to keep that to a minimum now.

I used to zig zag my edges, but then I was having trouble with my machine light (vibrations from the zig zagging would make the light go out; it turned out to be a faulty light), so I started making several small notches along the cut edges; the fabric frays between the notches, but there are none of the longer threads that wrap around and cause wrinkles. Now that my light situation is fixed, I could go back to zig zagging, but the notching is faster and doesn't waste thread. However, I believe I lost less fabric with the zig zagging and it was neater, and not all those bits of tangled thread everywhere.