How to Prevent Fabric Bleeding

To wash or not to wash is a personal preference some quilters have. My preference is not to wash fabrics, I like them to be nice and crisp when I use them. But for some fabrics you do have to wash them because they will bleed, and you don't want this beautiful quilt that you just finished making and stick it in the washer and find that one of the fabrics bleeds onto your other fabric. So there are some ways to test to see if you need to prewash your fabrics. Usually it's a batik and they're usually solid batiks. Printed batiks don't tend to bleed because there's other colors in them. The ones that bleed the most would be blacks, dark colors like blacks, navies, some purples may bleed, and also some oranges and reds and yellows may bleed. So to test to see if it's gonna bleed, what you're gonna do is you're gonna take some hot water, I have a bowl of hot water here, and you're gonna put your fabric in that hot water, and I usually use a paper towel to test to see if it's gonna bleed, and you put your fabric in that hot water. And then I will place it on the paper towel. I can't see. And usually you can see if it's gonna bleed. Now here I see my the color of my water is changing colors. If I squeeze it you can see it's getting a little darker each time I squeeze it. So that I'm gonna have to wash. And there's a couple of different things you can do with that fabric, is you can either stick it in your washing machine with a product called Synthrapol, and Synthrapol is just used for dyed fabrics. If you do all your own hand-dyed fabrics you can use the Synthrapol. There's another product called dye catchers, you can buy it in your local grocery store in the laundry department or Walmart. And those you can stick in the wash as you're washing them. Now I don't recommend washing a fabric that's gonna bleed with other fabrics that don't bleed even though the catchers will catch that dye. I do say that you should wash them in the same color. So if they're all dark, say they're all blue, navies, or blacks or something, you can wash all those together, But you're not gonna want to wash your light fabrics in there if they bleed too. So let's look and see, let's try the yellow one and see if that one's gonna bleed. So let me take some more hot water here, put my yellow fabric in there, and get my paper towel. Sometimes you'll see an orange dye come out of a yellow. And let me check and see if it dye's coming out of this one. If it doesn't then I don't have to wash it, but I don't think so. I don't see this water changing colors at all. So I don't have to prewash that yellow. And here's a print. Like I said, if you have a print that's batik, tendency is that they won't bleed on you unless it's the the print is, all of it as dark. So this is not changing color at all in that water. So I wouldn't have to prewash this. So always pre-test, well wait a minute, looks like it might be turning a little pink. Yes, it is turning pink. See if I squeeze it and the water's starting to turn pink. So I would have to prewash this. Now that's because we have, it's kind of what's called a tone on tone. So I would prewash that. So whenever you get a batik fabric, most regular printed cottons do not bleed. I would check the dark colors just to make sure, but for batik fabrics, anything that's dark or has orange or red in it, I would test those to make sure that they don't bleed. And if they do bleed, then go ahead and wash them in Synthrapol, and that's using hot water, you want to use the hottest water you can, or using a product called dry catchers. And then you won't be sorry after you put the quilt together because all the dye will have come out of the fabric.