Quilting with Textured Fabrics

As quilt makers, most of us are taught that we're supposed to use one type of fabric, cotton. And most of the time that cotton has no tactile texture to it, it's quite smooth. And all of the texture is derived by visual texture. That is what we see on the surface, the print or the design. But I've been having a lot of fun playing with textured fabrics. And they're very easy to use and they add so much to the surface of our quilts. Textured fabrics can be found all over the place mostly in higher end fabric stores, but you can find them in places like the chain stores too. So here are some textured fabrics that I've been playing with lately. This first one right here, is called a dobby, D-O-B-Y, because it has raised areas almost like a seersucker. It's also got a nice stripe of gold in it. This is one of my favorites. It's got these beautiful embroidered flowers on it as well as leaves. And they just kinda move across the surface. This one is just a plain old linen but it's got a great texture in it because of the heavy weave. This one's really fun too. It's got this great ruffle, if you will, that runs across it. One of my absolute favorite fabrics is a pineapple fabric. And this is sometimes called pineapple silk but it's made from pineapple and it has great luster to it as well as a texture. And then this is a jacquard. And a jacquard simply means that it has a design woven into it. And this beautiful fabric has stripes, as well as little polka dots that are like chenille. They're really, really nice to play with, they act just like regular cottons so you can use them in your regular quilts. Here I've used it in a small art quilt and here we can see the wonderful embroidered flower on here. This is a beautiful velvet that feels really soft and yummy. One of the dobbies, a raw silk here, and some more of that embroidered cotton. And you can see that it takes a simpler fabric or a simpler coloration of a fabric, and that texture really adds some drama to it. Now, if you're more of a traditionalist, you can piece with these also. Sometimes you might have to make some little adjustments in the seam allowance or something like that because of the heaviness. But normally I treat them just like I would any other fabric. So, here we've got an embroidered cotton in the background here. Here we have a wonderful dobby again and that means it has a raised design and the design is a circle. So it really made it fun to quilt. I got to quilt around those circles there. Here we have some more of the embroidered cotton and another embroidered cotton. They just really add some wonderful life to your quilts. So the next time you see one in the quilt store or the fabric store and wonder what you could do with it, you can bring it home and play with it with all the rest of your regular quilters cottons and really make something wonderful. Should give it a try.