All About Fabric
In PreQuilt, there are two different types of fabrics:
Solid Fabric Swatches
Printed Fabric Swatches
And your fabric swatches can be used dynamically or statically as:
Fabric Links (dynamic use)
Static Fabrics (static 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.
01 | Solid Fabric Swatches
Solid fabric swatches were the first digital fabric swatches we had in PreQuilt and are based on the color cards from the major solid fabric manufacturers like Robert Kaufman's Kona fabrics or Free Spirit's Designer Essential Solids. We were fortunate to have been invited to use some open source resources shared by quilters like Steph Skardal as a starting point.
We now have the solid color cards digitized and preloaded in PreQuilt for almost all the major fabric manufacturers.
Art Gallery Fabrics - Pure Elements Solids
American Made - Cotton Solids
Andover - Century Solids
Free Spirit - Designer Essential Solids
Michael Miller - Cotton Couture
Moda - Bella Solids
Northcott - ColorWorks
Paintbrush Studio - Painter's Palette Solids
Robert Kaufman - Kona Solids
RJR - Cotton Supremes
Riley Blake - Confetti Cottons
Tilda - Solids
Windham - Ruby + Bee
We do our best to keep these up to date, but if you find we're missing something, please feel free to email us and we'll happily update it.
For the extensive Help Guide on Solid Fabric Swatches, click on the link below:
Solid Fabric Swatches02 | 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 they will have a ruler along the bottom to denote the width of the swatch.
PreQuilt is able to use digital fabric swatches for your printed fabric to preview your quilt ideas. If the swatch provided is smaller than the quilt piece the fabric swatch is placed in, the digital swatch will be tiled to fill the space. You are also able to reposition and rotate your digital fabric swatch as well.
In a few steps, you can import a digital fabric swatch into PreQuilt and link it to a patchwork piece in your quilt and quickly see what it'd look like.
For the extensive Help Guide on Printed Fabric Swatches, click on the link below:
Printed Fabric Swatches03 | Fabric Links (formerly Color Tags)
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.
In the example below, the fabric swatch used by Fabric Link A was changed from Kona black to Kona bright pink. The change was done once and then automatically pushed to all pieces that were connected and using Fabric Link A.
For the extensive Help Guide on Fabric Links, click on the link below:
Fabric Links04 | Static Fabrics
A Static Fabric in PreQuilt is a fabric that is not used in a Fabric Link. A Static Fabric is used for a particular block piece and remains fixed. The block piece that uses this fabric will not dynamically be updated or changed when features like the Color Randomizer is used.
The benefit of using a Static Fabric is that you do not need to create Fabric Links for fabrics you know you will not want to change. One example could be a panel quilt, where the panel is static and won't be effected by any dynamic changes.
If you're ever finding that a the fabric used in a quilt is not changing when you're expecting it to (like when using the color randomizer or when changing a Fabric Link), it probably is because that block piece is using a static fabric. The simple fix is to edit the quilt block and link the block piece to the desired Fabric Link.
For the extensive Help Guide on Static Fabrics, click on the link below:
Static Fabrics05 | Fussy Cutting
Fussy Cutting is a term that is used to describe the targeted selection and cutting from fabric of a particular image. 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.
One of the best by-products of our newest Fabric features (launched October 2023) is that you can now visualize precision and seamless pattern matched fussy cut blocks in PreQuilt.
For the extensive Help Guide on Fussy Cutting, click on the link below:
Fussy CuttingLast updated
