Talking textile with Laurie from Trend-Tex

The guest speaker at the Piecemaker Quilt Guild meeting a couple days ago was Laurie, from Trend-Tex. He presented about fabric and the journey fabrics takes to get to us. It was amazing!

It was a very informative presentation. Laurie was full of knowledge, and shared it all with humor. Really loved it!

Some of the most interesting stuff for me were the differences between flatbed and rotary screen printing machines, and the digital machines. Both in terms of quality, number of inks, and speed of production. Also in terms of more environment friendly printing - the digital printers use a lot less ink.

Also of interest was that quilting cotton these days is of a much higher quality these days, so well-cared for quilts are more likely to last 100 or 200 years. It pays to label your quilts. I discussed this afterwards with my wife. Older quilts were often made with flour sack cotton, or clothes that weren’t suitable for wearing. It makes sense that in today’s world of hobby quilting, with better fabrics, our work will outlast that of older quilts.

Laurie also spoke about quality control of fabrics, and how fabrics coming from Japan and South Korea are typically better than that from other provenance. The amount of waste on a roll of fabric from the US was staggeringly high!

Laurie suggested that maybe we don’t have “big fabric stashes”, but that instead, we are “curators of a private fabric collection”. I found this more amusing than it probably is!