Beautiful !! Good to "see" you....What else have you been up to, Connie??

Beautiful quilt, Connie. I envy your feathers!

Well, the year is WAY past half over, but I have a finish to share! This is the quilt presented to my daughter and son-in-law on their first anniversary yesterday. Wedding guests signed muslin triangles, which were then pieced into the quilt top. This is the first project I quilted on my new HQ Sweet Sixteen, and it was pure pleasure to have so much elbow room to work in!

Who knew !? So much variety..and yet, generally, we understand.....

It really is interesting, isn't it!! When we have a big ole party, and everyone gets together with the aid of the TQS express, maybe we need to do like Rosemary said and bring samples of things to compare!! We can dream, can't we?

Well this has turned out very interesting I must say and have to laugh also, but I looked it up and Wikipedia says what we here in Australia know of calico.

"Calico" in British usage is a plain-woven textile made from unbleached, and often not fully processed, cotton. It may contain unseparated husk parts, for example. The fabric is less coarse and thick than canvas or denim, but owing to its unfinished and undyed appearance, it is still very cheap. Originally from the city of Kozhikode (known by Europeans as Calicut in the 11th century) in Kerala, India. The fabric was made by the traditional weavers called chaliyans. The raw fabric was dyed and printed in bright hues and calico prints became popular in Europe.

I have to say I don’t think here calico has ever been sold or seen dyed in colours and patterns although I could be wrong, here you would not these days make clothes out of it or anything like that, you would use it for example to wrap around a pudding to boil it, or I use it to cover my mini ironing board as you can’t buy covers like you can the normal size boards things like that, it’s very cheap but because of the type of fabric it is here it gave me an instant heirloom look of the old horse and buggy days when they used to use it to make clothes out of, and after you give it a good wash it loses its stiffness.

Nappies here are in a towelling type of fabric and muslin is very very thin fabric that we wrap a baby in but as it’s so thin it lets the air in, in our hot climate.

Have we gone full circle

And then a soft cotton gauze is used for bandages here in UK....

I seem to recall that calico chintzs were so called because they were originally imported from Calcutta, hence the name.

Wendy, what you call "muslin" is what we call "cheesecloth"!

Besides the uses you mentioned, I also use cheesecloth as a "tack cloth" when refinishing furniture to remove dust after sanding.

This reference refers to the cloth as a "cotton gauze textile"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tack_cloth

Gee....it's no wonder that some of the instructions written in other countries, using words we THINK we understand, don't turn out like we expected!!

Here we call muslin cheesecloth. Calico is a basic unbleached cream-coloured cotton. Nicely confusing isn't it? We used to use terry towelling for nappies (diapers) but very few people don't use disposable ones now.

For once I knew you call calico muslin and I think what you call calico I call chintz . What I know as muslin is the very fine open cloth used jam making, lining nappies and straining cheese. http://www.thechildmindingshop.co.uk/muslin-squares---large-12430-p.asp

Too bad TQS doesn't have Feel-e-vision and Smell-e-vision as well as Tele-vision!!

I wonder if your "baby wraps" are what we call "diapers". I think the Brits call them "nappies". That is a very loosely woven cotton fabric.

Anyway....Muslin does come in different weights and is solid cream or tan in color.
I also have some bleached muslin that is a very nice weight cotton for quiltmaking and I have also used it for printed labels.

In fact, I think it may be the base fabric that Ricky and Justin use for their wonderful hand dyed pieces!

And....when we call a fabric "calico" it usually refers to a printed fabric....often with a small print like the 30's reproduction fabrics.

I found this labeled typical American calico on Pinterest:

Calicos/muslins come in various different weights - perhaps we ought to have an international calico/muslin swap to see what others around the world are using....

Margo I was not sure myself so I checked with a friend and she says "no Muslin is a flimsy, quite open weave fairly fine cotton - you might have seen 'baby wraps' made of it. Calico is coarse, close weaved cotton"