Months ago, Dierdre McElroy joined us for our Eavesdrop on a Telephone Conversation. Dierdre is an expert hand quilter and very knowledgeable about fabric, thread, thimbles and most everything that can affect the quality of your hand quilting.
During our Conversation, she talked about how thread count affects the quality of fabric and ultimately how it will affect your ability to create beautiful quilting stitches.
Here is part of our Conversation:
The quality of your fabric is defined by an even Thread Count
When you have thread counts running in two different directions and crossing over each other, it ends up looking like a piece of graph paper.
As everybody knows, graph paper is perfectly even. All of the squares are actual squares. There’s the same amount of lines going in each direction per inch. It’s exactly like that on a quality piece of fabric.
To define that means that quality could mean cheesecloth at the supermarket. For instance, 10/10 is even and therefore quality, but none of us are going to quilt with that. There’s quality, but also the right tool for the job.
As a hand quilter, you want fabrics that are evenly threaded or woven but also in the mid-70s to the mid-90s. An example would be 76/76. The important thing to remember with thread count is there are always two numbers.
When you go to Macy’s and are about to spend $500 on a new set of sheets that they’re saying are 600 thread count, you only know one number. This means you really don’t know what quality that fabric is because you don’t know the other side of it. That’s how they get you.
Those sheets tend to be 600 one direction and about 92 the other. That’s why after you wash your sheets the first couple of times, you will have a hard time stretching them across the corners of the bed or they have pilled. The thread counts are uneven and the fabric is actually fighting itself from one direction to the other.
You can be a machine quilter, anal with your quarter-inch seam allowances, have a $6,000 Bernina, have taken every class known to man, and yet when you’re done with your quilt tops they’re slightly un-square.
Uneven thread counts stretch way more one direction than the other. The bias stretches five times more than a normal bias.
But, you don’t want to spend hours in a quilt shop trying to figure out how many threads there are on the straight grain and how many on the cross grain.
Dierdre McElroy came up with an easy way to tell what the thread count is, and it can easily be carried with you as you shop for your fabric.
This tool will tell you the Thread Count of your fabric without your eyes having to focus on individual strands and track them across an inch under a magnifier.
Use the R.O.S.E.™ to:
- help you match grain lines in piecing
- choose a fabric that won't fray during appliqué
- manipulate the drape in wearable arts
So many possible applications to help you make your quilts squarer, flatter, last longer and look spectacular.
The R.O.S.E. Thread Counter can be found here: R.O.S.E. Thread Counter
Happy Quilting!
Penny Halgren
Master Quilter
