I understand the why of shrinking. I understand the loss of bright colors. What I am not understanding is the loose threads. The only time I have ever had loose threads was when I didn't catch the seams correctly. Can you explain what happened?

I have always prewashed since I was growing up with a seamstress mother. When new fabric finishes came along,
some of my children reacted to them if someone gifted them and had not prewashed the item before.
My most sensitive son has now developed many food allergies in middle age too.

With as much laundry as I had when all four kids lived at home, prewashing did not take much more time then. Now it is so much easier with most kids gone.

For those of us committed to re-purposing good quality cottons, your experience seems to confirm our deeply held beliefs. Nonetheless, I have been known to pick up a fabric to complete a project when I need a particular print or look. I appreciate you sharing this to remind me that those prints need to be washed, too!

Thanks for turning your pain into our gain:)

I have prewashed from day one. ANd after seeing how some customers treat the fabric whether or not they purchase it, I will continue.

The Spring brand fabric that Wally has and may still carry will really shrink. I was making something using some red spring fabric and a friend was pressing the blocks for me. When I started to sew them together with the other cotton fabric pieces, they wouldn't fit. I had carefully cut and was dumbfounded about the problem, so I cut some more red squares and re measured them after they were pressed-lo and behold it shrunk almost a half of an inch. I had already washed it since it was red. I have never used any more spring fabric. Glad to know about their Waverly brand. Several years ago, our Wally carried fabric and had some very good quality fabric, but that was before Mr. Sam passed away, I think a lot of their quality items have really diminished since his death. Now it seems that $$$ is all the children care about-find and sell the cheapest items, not satisfying the customers with good quality products.

I have a lot of fabric and can actually smell the dye smells outgassing in the sewing room, even after having prewashed almost everything. So I prewash everything new TWICE in the hope of minimizing that.

I prewash for my health.

So sorry to hear of your problem. It seems that, in today's world, the mantra is cheap, cheap, cheap. When I was growing up after the war, Japan had a terrible reputation for making junk. They have certainly cleaned up their act, but we have been spoiled by cheaply made Chinese goods. Hope that eventually they, too, will clean up their act. I won't be around to know that, though.

A number of years ago I decided to wash my whole stash of 30+ years; what chore! I'm still washing...

I did learn a thing or two about washing fabric, though. Pinking doesn't work to keep the ends of the fabric from fraying and getting stringy. Stringy fabric will knot together with every other piece of fabric in the wash and in the dryer it turns itself into a giant ball of fabric. I also heard that you can cut the corner of the fabric pieces to keep them from fraying; I don't know who made that up, but, that was a great big lie or at least wishful thinking!

The only thing that keeps the fabric from fraying is to zig-zag the ends of the fabric and any part of the fabric that has been cut. Surging works, too.

I also learned that it doesn't matter what color you wash that you can come up with some surprising color bleeding. This I could understand with some of the cheap fabric that I used to buy when I started quilting 40 years ago, but was gob smacked when quilt shop fabric of a pale yellow and a pale pink bled. You just never know what you are going to get these days. Thank God for Color Catchers.

And one more thing I learned... if you have been quilting for a long time you need to regularly check the thread you are using for easy breakage before you start sewing. I was surprised how many of my not-so-old thread would break very easily. I can't say that a particular brand broke more easily than another, but I have had to throw away a number of spools of thread because of this. That is until I got smart and marked the spools on the thread that broke easily and started using that thread to sew the edge of my fabric before washing. I just hated wasting the thread and it didn't matter what thread I used to keep the fraying down.

The Waverly I have looked at has been a really poor quality, so decided it was not worth my time and effort on something that wasn't going to hold up. Seems to be a very loosely woven fabric.

I'm not a pre-washer. I will consider washing prior to each project now though. The thought of washing all the fabric I have....as it comes in the house seems a waste of time and resources for me. Especially since, if I get new fabric, I try to cycle out the same amount of fabric that I no longer love as much or may never use. This way my stash doesn't grow stagnant or any bigger than it already is.