Everything we make is printed into the fabric rather than onto it, which changes the care instructions in one important way: you are washing a piece of cloth, not protecting a coating. That makes the rules shorter than you expect.
The rules
- Machine wash cold, gentle or normal cycle
- Tumble dry low, or line dry
- No bleach, no fabric softener
- Wash separately the first time
- Iron on low from the reverse if you must, but you rarely need to
Why cold
Not to protect the print — the print is in the fibre and does not care. Cold is for the batting. A quilted piece has a layer of wadding between two faces of cloth, and hot water plus a hot dryer is what makes wadding shift and bunch. Cold water and a low dryer keep the loft even for years.
Why no fabric softener
Softener coats fibres to make them feel slippery. On a sofa cover that is the opposite of what you want: the non-slip backing works by friction, and softener reduces it. On a table runner it makes the cloth slide on a polished table. Skip it.
Stains
Deal with it while it is wet if you can. Blot, do not rub — rubbing pushes it into the batting where cold water will not reach it.
- Red wine, coffee, gravy — blot, then cold water and a normal cycle. Most of it comes out.
- Candle wax — let it set hard, lift the lump off, then a warm iron over brown paper to draw out the rest.
- Mud and paw prints — let it dry completely and brush it off before washing. Wet mud spreads.
- Pine sap from a tree skirt — a little rubbing alcohol on a cloth, then wash cold.
Drying
Low heat, and take it out slightly damp if you can. A quilted piece dried bone dry on high comes out stiffer than it went in. Fifteen minutes on a rail finishes it and leaves it softer.
Tree skirts and sofa covers are large and heavy when wet. If your machine is small, a laundrette dryer once a season is easier than fighting it at home, and it is what most people with a 72 inch skirt end up doing.
Storage between seasons
Fold rather than roll, and store somewhere dry. The print does not crack at a fold, so you do not need tissue paper or acid-free anything — that advice belongs to screen-printed and painted textiles.
What does matter is damp. A quilted piece stored in a garage or a loft through a humid summer can come out smelling of it, and that is harder to fix than any stain. A cupboard inside the house is enough.
Velvet, specifically
The velvet runners wash the same way but need one extra step. Pile can flatten in patches in the dryer. Brush it back with your hand in the direction of the nap while it is still slightly damp, or give it a moment of low steam held away from the surface. It comes back.
How long they last
The honest answer is that the printing outlasts the sewing. We have not seen an all-over print fade in normal domestic washing, because there is nothing sitting on the surface to wear off. What eventually goes is a bound edge on a piece that is washed weekly for years.
Which is a long way of saying: wash it. A cover you are afraid to clean is a cover you stop using. Browse sofa covers, table runners or tree skirts and pick something you will actually put on the furniture.
The first wash
Wash a new piece on its own the first time. Not because it will run — the print is in the fibre and there is no surface dye to lose — but because new quilted textiles shed a small amount of loose fibre from the batting, and you would rather that was not on a dark shirt.
After the first wash the piece will look slightly softer and sit better. That is the batting settling, and it is normal. Nothing shrinks meaningfully at cold temperatures.
Hard water
If you live somewhere with hard water and your towels come out stiff, quilted pieces will too. The fix is the same: a smaller dose of detergent, and half a cup of white vinegar in the rinse instead of softener. Vinegar cuts the mineral residue without coating the fibres, so the non-slip backing keeps working.
How often
There is no rule, only what the piece is doing. A sofa cover in a house with a dog is a weekly wash; the same cover in a spare room is twice a year. A table runner that catches a Sunday roast goes in afterwards; one on a console table gets shaken out and put back.
Tree skirts are the odd one. They need a wash mid-season if the tree is real — needles and water see to that — and one at the end before storage. Putting a skirt away with sap on it is how you find a stain set hard next December.
What not to do
- Dry cleaning — unnecessary, and the solvents are harder on batting than water is.
- Hot wash to sanitise — cold plus detergent handles ordinary household soil. Heat is what damages loft.
- Oxygen bleach on a colour — it will not touch the print, but it will dull a bound edge over time.
- Wringing by hand — twisting a wet quilted piece displaces the batting permanently. Press the water out instead.
A word on smell
Anything stored folded in a cupboard for eleven months smells of the cupboard. That is not the fabric and it does not need washing to fix — an hour on a line in moving air removes it. Keep that in mind in late November, when a tree skirt comes out of a box and the instinct is to launder it before it has even been used.
From the range
The washing routine above applies to every quilted piece here: