When a UK magazine says

"Cheryl Isaak" wrote

We also know 'Bondaweb' as 'Wundaweb'. Very handy for hemming, unless you shorten your son's trousers the wrong way (on your daughter's wedding day) :o( I've used Wundaweb to back very small xstitch projects.

Muslin is thinner than calico.

>

Google is your friend. I looked up Bondaweb, and the second site I came to said Bondaweb (Wonder Under in the U.S.).

Olwyn Mary in New Orleans

Bondaweb is that white stuff you can stitch into lapels etc or iron on. Fusible something or other I think it is called here lol

Muslin = calico - to me anyway.

Parrotfish is correct. Both calico and muslin are plain weave cotton fabrics, but calico is much more densely woven than muslin.

John

It`s the stuff you iron on instead of hemming - or slightly heavier, it`s interfacing.

Calico is nothing like muslin - it`s much thicker. Muslin`s very light and thin - practiically "see through"

Pat

Calico is a cotton weave used for dresses and blouses, so it's got more body than muslin. Muslin is more suited to slips and the like. I just finished re-reading a couple of my old Little House books, and that seems to be the distinction.

Louisa

The UK quilters over at RCTQ say that what we call muslin -- for quilt backing, etc. -- is what they call calico. For the USA folks, muslin isn't printed, it's usually an off-white color, often with very tiny darker flecks scattered throughout. It is also available bleached and then it is very white. Good muslin (there are grades of muslin, just like any other fabric) is fairly densely woven and I use it all the time for the backs of my quilts and often in the front blocks, too. For the USA folks calico is ALWAYS a printed fabric, usually with a small floral (but not always) design. As Sheena says, the bondaweb is inner facing. IIRC, it's an iron in fabric, that's what the "bond" part in the name means. CiaoMeow >^;;^<

PAX, Tia Mary >^;;^< (RCTQ Queen of Kitties) Angels can't show their wings on earth but nothing was ever said about their whiskers! Visit my Photo albums at

Any that I ever used was chock full of sizing and got really flimsy when it was washed. I suppose there might be a better quality but I never really looked very hard to find it.

L

I don't think it was supposed to be quality stuff and for sure it would shrink, so pre-washing was advised. Not that one washes a gold work piece but it was the smell I couldn't take. I buy a metre at a time and wash it well then cut as needed.

I also use it to make some pillow forms, ones that would be stuffed then put inside the finished pillow.

That's batiste here.

That was the kind of thing I used it for. I didn't think it would hold up well for anything that got a lot of heavy use.

Really good quality muslin (USA type) can be purchased at quilt shops. I get all of mine from Joanns when I have a coupon so I often buy 10 to 20 yards of the 90" wide stuff. Even the quality muslin will shrink, just not usually as much as the less expensive stuff. I'm one of the "wash new fabric ASAP" schools of thought so I cut my muslin about 5" larger than is required and then it's washed and dried in the dryer before I use it. This helps to "tighten" the fabric weave and helps reduce excessive long-term shrinkage. I'm not sure where the muslin from Joanns is made but you can be sure it's not on this continent!! CiaoMeow >^;;^<

PAX, Tia Mary >^;;^< (RCTQ Queen of Kitties) Angels can't show their wings on earth but nothing was ever said about their whiskers! Visit my Photo albums at

Tia Mary wrote: > Really good quality muslin (USA type) can be purchased at quilt

Sue

More likely cheesecloth, I gathered from previous iterations of this thread on other groups.

At one time, "muslin" meant something like what we mean by "batiste"

-- a very fine, high-quality, imported cotton used for making elegant gowns.

As time goes by, names that imply elegance get applied to cheaper and cheaper products. The British vendors went for "sleazy", the American vendors went for "coarse". By the nineteen forties, "muslin" in America meant sheeting coarser than percale -- judging by an old advertisement (perhaps from the thirties; I no longer remember where I saw it), muslin was the standard sheet and percale was for the wealthy. The ad urged housewives to switch to percale because they would save enough on laundry paid for by the pound to pay for the sheets, and in the meanwhile, you'd have nicer sheets. In the sixties, I bought muslin because it was more durable than percale.

Nowadays, of course, I buy whatever is wide enough, all cotton, and not the crackly, insanely-tight fabric that RTW cotton sheets are made from. (I once ran a piece of worn-out RTW sheet through my printer

*without* ironing it to freezer paper or doing anything other than tearing it to size.)

I used quilt liner for some time; this was so near disposable that when I bought scenery muslin, I bought enough to make two generous sets, forgetting that I had already made one pair to establish that the fabric would work. Then I got tired of that immense pile of fabric in my stash and made up the second set while the first was still new -- I may *never* need new sheets, and fabric.com has much nicer fabric really cheap these days. :-(

On the other hand, really-cheap fabric is seldom white.

In a nineteenth-century book -- perhaps _Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm_

-- the impoverished protagonist makes her graduation gown of "butter muslin". I got the impression that this was a fine cheesecloth -- today's "cheesecloth" is used for cleaning rags, and isn't fine enough to filter cheese -- perhaps "butter muslin" was what the British mean by "muslin" today. I *think* the setting was American.

Another, definitely-American, set of nineteenth-century novels was the Samantha series by "Josiah Allen's Wife". In _Samantha Among the Brethren_, some nutcases make themselves robes of "book muslin". After a lot of dictionarying, I learned that the robes were organdy -- "book muslin" was sold folded back and forth in leaves instead of rolled on a bolt like other fabrics.

Muslin was often dyed (red is mentioned most often on old books), but I've never seen it other than white and unbleached -- and, nowadays, "natural" (dyed ecru). Dyed plain-woven lightweight solid cottons are now "broadcloth".

Hnh. Google says that cotton broadcloth *must* have a fine crosswise rib, like poplin; all the broadcloth I've bought has been like a good grade of muslin. But I seldom buy solid-colored cottons.

Joy Beeson

*snippage*

I'm really not visualizing what you're calling cheesecloth. The stuff I use *is* able to filter cheese and yogurt and the like, and has not, IME, been used for general cleaning rags, except as tackcloth in carpentry after being saturated with varnish.

This is what I know as cheesecloth:

regard to batiste (which is how I know it), Silk Road fabrics defines it thusly: "Cotton batiste is a lightweight, sheer, delicate fabric in a plain weave. Similar to cotton lawn, but thicker. Batiste has a very delicate hand. It has a graceful drape, and is often mercerized to add luster." I couldn't find a good picture to express myself any better than that. Perhaps this: don't know how this discussion is defining calico, since I seem to remember about 3 grades of cotton being labeled "calico" in the time I've spent working in fabric shops, the cheapest and most coarse (and chemical stinky!) being straight from India/Pakistan. Broadcloth and the good quality printed quilt cottons seem to me to be the same weight, the difference being one's printed and the other is not.

Muslin seems to be the thickest of the woven cottons we're talking about here, somewhat coarse to a little finer, depending on bleached or unbleached.

To clarify: I'm only talking about what fabrics in fabric shops are labeled hereabouts where I live. I'm sure 19th and early 20th century labels are different.

The picture and paragraph about cheesecloth is exactly what I think of.

The explanation for batiste is good but the picture not so much, at least for me. I remember a smoother, more elegant looking fabric.

Broadcloth and muslin are okay

With calico, all I can think of when I think of that name is an old cowboy song that said something about: "a gal in calico, down in Santa Fe." In my mind calico was always a kind of rough cotton with a pattern of little flowers. Now I'm going to google calico and Santa Fe and see if I can find the song.

L

This may be a no no, but I'm adding a p.s. to my note.

For anyone who's curious, here's a link to the song that's been torturing for the last few days.

another bit of triva.>

Yes, I agree. I don't know if anybody remembers my post about when I went to the Missouri State Fair and saw this really elegant christening dress done in a variety of stitches (white on white), but it was done on batiste. It was best in show. Here:

Yeah, with the name "calico," I can only think of 19th century dressgoods. I think someone mentioned Little House and that's exactly the image I get in my head. I really wouldn't know what that is in today's jargon. Possibly homespun? (Though I seriously doubt it.)