Pretty Reds All In A Row

I just washed and ironed all the red fabrics that are going into my next quilting project. I skip this step whenever possible but had a few reds in a scrappy Christmas quilt run on me a few years ago and learnt my lesson. (Fortunately, most of the red that ran washed out in the next wash and you have to look very close to see any problem now, but still, I don't want to go through that again.) And I was reminded to pre-wash a few days ago in a post from Nicole of Sister's Choice.

That crumpled up white thing on top of the red fabric is a Woolite Dye Magnet. Nicole uses a product called Color Catchers, which works similarly. These products attract and hold any dye that runs out of the fabric in the wash water, preventing pink or red smudges in areas that shouldn't be pink and giving you a good idea of how much dye ran when you washed the fabric. In this case, it was hardly anything. There are just a few pinkish smudges on the dye magnet sheet. So I should not have any problems when I wash the finished quilt.

I'm thinking I should wash the rest of the fabric I am using in this project. Not for color fastness but for shrinkage. So it is uniform. Oh boy, more ironing!