Using Fabric Fray in Your Quilt Design

One of the facts of life with quilting is that cotton fabrics do tend to fray. So, I like to kind of take advantage of that. There are some fabrics that fray better than others. Probably the least good frayer is batiks because they're so tightly woven, but you can see this wonderful fray here on this blue fabric and it's got some great texture on it. And so I like to use that texture as a design element in my quilts.

On this first piece, I've chosen lots of different fabrics because of their fray ability, if you will. So here, I've got some canvas that frays really nicely and you can see each individual little fiber there, and a little bit of silk that frayed beautifully too. And it just adds some really nice texture to the piece Here, I've used a fray to add to the sense of realism in a little tiny landscape. So right across here, I've used a frayed piece of fabric to look like little grasses, and that added some really fun texture. Here, I've got it as a contrast point.

So I took a piece of this wonderful blue green fabric, and ripped it into a square that was just slightly larger than this square here, and set this square on top, so that all you really saw was that fray. And I really liked the way that looks. It's just enough of that color. And it also raises the surface just a bit to add some nice interest. In this piece, this piece is all about the fray, beginning with this base.

So the base fabric that I've used on it is a piece of canvas and canvas does a really nice job fraying because the fibers are so thick. So when it frays, it's very noticeable. I've also repeated the canvas in here and use some linen, linens another fabric that frays really well. And this is some burlap, and burlap doesn't necessarily fray the way we think it would. We just pull those fibers out and we get this wonderful, wonderful texture.

So this whole piece is basically based on that wonderful fray. You can also tuck little bits of frayed fabric into your bindings. So here this purple fabric here, you can see that fray. And it's a wonderful fabric called a shot cotton that has one color of thread in the warp and a different color in the weft. So you're going to get a different color when it frays.

So here you can see that wonderful almost Navy blue at the edge of this violet. And I've just tucked that in before I stitched my binding down. So frays can be really, really fabulous. They're great design element, and they can raise the surface of your work and add wonderful interest. Give it a try.