With good quality batiks I never have had a problem

FYI...I recently made a large batik quilt and in the process of 'fixing' a quilting mistake, I sprayed part of it with water. It bled. After binding, I washed the quilt in Synthrapol with a color catcher. The color catcher came out dark greenish-blue, and my quilt ended up with dye marks throughout it. I tried 'fixing' that by using a color-run remover (which I later discovered is not good on 'fabrics which bleed on themselves'. This severely aged my quilt, washed out a huge amount of color from all of the batiks, left the light areas either grossly faded or splotched with color, and dyed my peach-colored non-batik to a pale green....it was a very disappointing experience. NOW, I wash my batiks well!!! I sent in my strips BEFORE I learned this lesson, so BE SURE TO WASH!!! And, I've since heard that RETAYNE is the best thing to wash them in! Oh, after my experience, I washed even some 2" strips I had for another project. They hardly unraveled at all, and I was still able to use them as 2" strips.

I pre-washed all of my batiks before cutting stips. I thought we were supposed to pre-wash. I guess I assumed this since the instructions for the batiks-r-us HST exchange required pre-washing. Guess I will be washing stips when they arrive.

Judy
Lovelady, TX

I use the 'Colour-Catchers' and haven't had any problems with bleeding on the quilts.

I'm often too lazy to pre-wash fabrics, but I always throw a few "Colour-Catcher" sheets in the washing machine when a finished quilt gets its first wash. Most times the sheets are still white after the wash, but sometimes they have turned a little pink or grey. So far I have never had any 'bleeding' with this method.

eeeekkkkk..... I'm going to play it safe and soak all my strips in warm water, bag them in a pillowcase and dry in the clothes dryer. I prefer to wash and then cut to prevent fraying but that's not an option here.

Margo wrote:

Out of curiosity I soaked some bright yellow batiks. I know it's best to wash in cold water, but used hot
just to see what would happen. Well, lo & behold, check out the color left in the water!

Hi Barb, please send me your info so that I can send you my strips.

Thanks,

Adele
mailto:sew_4fun@msn.com

Great news! I found my Edyta Sitar calendar. It was under the fabric leftover from cutting my strips! I was so glad to find it.

Judy
Lovelady, Texas

My 100 strips are in the mail. Looking forward to the new return package in May!

Hi Everyone,

Just a Friday update..

I have 125 packages with 20299 strips

I did a bit of fun math -

If we lay the strips end to end, it would extend 6.4 miles (10.3 kilometers)

If we lay the strips side by side, we have 423 yards (387 meters)

Hope my conversions are correct!

Have a great weekend.

Thanks for the update Barb. I love to see those numbers going up!!!! I can't wait for April 30th to come taht way you can start sending out pkgs. shortly after!

Hi Everyone,

Just an update... Today I opened envelopes from England and Austrailia - what fun!!

I have gotten 119 packages and have 19,287 strips sorted by the main color.

I have 19 emails stored and am waiting for those envelopes to arrive.

April 1st is this Friday which leaves about 30 days to get your strips to me.

Lottie, I love the idea, the quilts will look awesome, good work, sandy