Pre-Washing Trick

The one thing I dread when buying new fabric is having to pre-wash it. 

How many of you end up with messes like this?  

I have tried many tricks in the book, including using pinking shears to cut all the raw edges. I don't have a serger, so I tried using a tight zigzag stitch along the edges and decided it was too time consuming.

One night as I was laying in bed thinking of the million things I have to do, I thought about how to save some time when prewashing. And here is what I came up with. It might not be ideal for everyone or all types of fabric. But for my cotton fabric, I thought it worked wonders! 

I took my fabric I wanted to prewash and folded it to have the raw edges meet together. (I forgot to take a before picture!) I then sewed a quick top-stitch making sure to catch all the layers. I threw the whole piece into the wash, with a few other pieces of fabric and here is what I found when I pulled it out!

There were still some lose threads, which is going to happen no matter what, but they were not wrapped around the fabric squeezing the life out of it. 

So I threw it in the dryer, pressed it a little with the iron, and cut off the strip of frayed fabric with my rotary cutter. I figure I cut all those bad boys off anyway, why not keep them more contained.

                       

I used this fun fabric to make a fabulous baby gift set which can be seen in my other post!