Fabric 101

Fabric in PreQuilt 101

There are two different fabrics - Solid Fabric and Printed Fabric and in PreQuilt, these fabric swatches are organized into four categories:

Solid Fabric Swatches
Preloaded Fabric Collections of Printed Fabric Swatches
Your Fabric Stash
Your Fabric Pull

Fabric swatches can be used dynamically or statically as:

Fabric Links (dynamic use)
Static Fabrics (static, on-off use)
Fuzzy Cut (Manual)
Scrappy Fabrics (dynamic and random use)

What are the differences? Why so many options?!? Let's define them and please keep in mind we have separate and extensive Help Guides for each.

Fabrics Glossary

Solid Fabric Swatches

Solid fabric swatches are squares of color representing the color of a corresponding solid fabric in a manufacturer's color card. They will fill the entire shape of a piece of fabric with the color.

Printed Fabric Swatches

Printed fabric swatches (also referred to as digital fabric swatches) are digital versions of printed fabric. They are usually square JPG images and often times have a ruler along the bottom to denote the width of the swatch.

Preloaded Fabric Collection

A preloaded fabric collection is a group of printed fabrics that were launched together by a fabric manufacturer and (with permission) permanently added to PreQuilt. With the width of digtial fabric swatches already set, these printed fabric swatches are ready to use in any of your quilts.

Fabric Link

PreQuilt developed Fabric Links (formerly Color Tags) as a way to connect a fabric swatch to a quilt block piece or part of a quilt. Fabric links can be connected to both solid color swatches and printed fabric swatches.

A Fabric Link is used to connect a particular fabric swatch to a particular quilt block piece. So when the fabric swatch used by a Fabric Link is changed (from a solid to another solid or from a solid to a printed fabric swatch or from a printed fabric swatch to another printed fabric swatch), everything that is using that Fabric Link will also change and be updated automatically.

Static Fabric

A static fabric in PreQuilt is a fabric that is not connected to a Fabric Link. A Static Fabric is used for a particular block piece and remains fixed and must be changed manually one at a time. The block piece that uses this fabric will not dynamically be updated or changed using the Color Randomizer.

Fussy Cut Fabric

Fussy cutting is a term that is used to describe deliberately cutting out a particular part of a printed fabric. And in quilting, these selectively cut out pieces of fabric are then either pieced together by hand (typically English Paper Piecing) or by machine to create visually stunning quilt blocks.

Scrappy Fabric

The scrappy fabric feature uses a fabric pull to randomly place fabrics across a quilt in a scrappy manner. It is different from a fabric link in that the same block can be used with multiple scrappy versions created - without creating multiple blocks manually.