World Wide Quilting Page

Question of the Week

Question for the week of January 24, 2000:

Our question this week comes from KWS

What fabics would be considered contempary? I need to know for a class coming up next month.

Anne Armstrong :
Any good quality (of course) fabric that doen't look like your Mum would have used :-)

Caroline :
If you try the fabric lines of the producers to-day, e.g. Benartex, Hoffman's, Northcott, etc., you should come up with contempory fabrics. Also, prints differ according to quality: Some are not lined up properly on the fabric,either horizontaly or verticaly along the selvedge. And dye properties are important, too, as well as thread count. But especially, I think that contempory fabrics--, if the design is clear and uncluttered, if the colours follow the ideas from the colour wheel, if you use an assortment of print size, even dots or plaids, if you even use texture or semblance of it, contempory, or to-day's cloth, cannot be bettered.
Check out your stash. Tired of it? Probably because your stash is no longer "contempory"!

Barbara :
Any good grade 100% cotton fabric you like should be fine for a class. That is my 2 cents.

Maureen :
batik's, I've obseerved many batik's in contemporary quilts; some nature fabrics also.

Leslie :
I don't think of the reproductions, calicos or plaids as contemporary. I think of brights, wild prints, etc. You could probably get a lot of different answers to this one. If you're trying to choose fabrics for a quilt class, and there's no sample to give you ideas, then your best bet is to ask the teacher what she had in mind. Failing that, I'd just choose fabrics you like and that you consider contemporary. Good luck.

Lori Peters :
Well, for me contemporary would mean "new"...and that means HAND DYES! At least in my opinion anyway....
Anything that goes beyond the plain old country homespun stuff that's been out there for years is contemporary for me. And what's old is new again, 30's and civil war repros are very "in" too.

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