About fabric care...
The issue of fabric care can be confusing and a bit daunting! We hope to reassure and educate you here, to give you the confidence to care for your fabrics in a way that works best for you, and the fabric!
When we purchase fabrics they often arrive without fiber content or care information. It's fairly easy to test these fabrics to determine the fiber content most of the time, but occasionally a fabric can have multiple fibers, making it more difficult to analyze completely. We list exact fiber contents only when we are sure, and in other cases we enter something more general like "wool blend" or rayon blend", as long as we've determined the primary fiber.
Our practice regarding fabric care recommendations is to list the most conservative method of care for each fabric, based on what we're able to determine about the fiber content, and what we believe the manufacturer would endorse. However, since detergents, water quality and other factors can effect the way a fabric reacts, the best practice, if you are washing your fabric at home, is to test a swatch first for color fastness, shrinkage, change in texture, etc.
Since there is more than one way to launder a fabric, I asked Shannon Gifford to put together a guide to assist you in navigating through this complex world of fabric care. The guide may give you the confidence to try various methods of caring for your fabric besides the very conservative recommendations given on this website. Please take a moment to review Shannon's recommendations, and feel free to print them out, or refer back to them as often as you would like!
Note: In order to access these guides you need to have installed Adobe Acrobat Reader on your computer. Click here to find out about downloading this free software.