104 in the Shade

by Steffani McChesney

Okay, it’s three-digit, too-hot-to-breathe typical summer weather in Bakersfield, and as a paid-up member of the quilting sisterhood my thoughts naturally turn to flannel. Hey, can you blame me? Christmas is coming and I have quilts to make for presents. Besides, all of my family, on both my husband’s side and mine, live in the Rockies. Brrr. Flannel is the fabric of choice.

Flannel has taken over the quilting world. Half the fabrics in the shops seem to be flannel these days. Not just lumberjack shirt plaid and blue and pink bunnies either. The colors are glorious and the prints are in every style a quilter could dream of.

So where did flannel come from? The first flannel was made of wool and used for clothing. Most of the flannel was made in Wales since there were lots of sheep and labor was cheap. Some time in the early Nineteenth Century mills were built in Welsh cities, due to the availability of American cotton. Cotton flannel was developed in these mills to imitate wool flannel as an inexpensive alternative for the masses. It became popular for petticoats, nightclothes, and baby clothes, particularly diapers, or nappies, as our British cousins call them. Flannel was also used to make tobacco premiums like the silk premiums used so often in Victorian crazy quilts. The flannel ones were often printed to look like Oriental or Navajo rugs, which were popular with little girls to use in their dollhouses.

Cotton flannels make wonderful quilts, but there are a few things you have to remember when using them. Because flannel is woven in a twill pattern with a lower thread count than the regular cotton cloth weave used in quilters’ fabric, it tends to stretch more, especially on bias edges. It also shrinks a lot more than regular cotton (sometimes up to 13 percent) necessitating the purchase of a little more fabric than the pattern calls for. Needless to say, you should always preshrink flannel before making a quilt. Different flannels tend to shrink at very different rates, which could make a real mess of an unpreshrunk (is that a word?) quilt when it is washed for the first time. Another flannel foible is that it tends to distort more than regular cotton. Again, blame the weave and the thread count.

A few more hints to get you through making your flannel quilt include:

1. Use a larger needle like an 80 and change often. They dull faster sewing flannel.
2. Use a thin batt or even another piece of flannel in your quilt to reduce bulk and weight. Some teachers recommend pressing your seams open for the same reason.
3. Try a single-fold binding to save your fingers.
4. Use a simple pattern based on squares and rectangles to prevent distortion.

So what are you waiting for? Rotary cutters at the ready! Get out that flannel and start cutting. Christmas is only four months away.