At a glance
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3 yard cut, 108'' long by 65'' wide (165 cm)
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100% cotton fabric, one continuous piece
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Lightweight weave so that the fabric is easy to handle and forgiving for everyday makes (it is on the thinner, slightly sheer side, so worth keeping in mind for projects where coverage matters)
- White Supreme, a clean flat white with no print and no direction
- Supreme Solids Collection
The piece you reach for on nearly every project. A plain white cotton is what sits behind the blocks, separates the colors and gives the eye somewhere to rest, and it is the first thing most makers run out of. This one comes as a single 3 yard cut, 108 inches long and 65 inches wide, so there is enough of it to background a whole quilt top and still have some left for the next one. Cut into it from any edge. There is no repeat to match and no right way up.
About this white
White Supreme is a clean, even white. Not the blue-tinted optical white that makes cream fabrics beside it look dirty, and not an ivory either. It reads as white in daylight and stays quiet under lamplight, which is what you want from a background: it should hold still while the colors work.
White is the color we now take for granted, and it used to be the most expensive thing in the linen closet. Before chemistry, white was made by sunlight. Cloth was boiled, soaked in lye, and then spread on grass in open fields for weeks at a time, wetted again and again so the sun could do the rest. Whole towns kept bleaching fields, and cloth was left on them for so long that some places passed laws making the theft of linen from a bleaching green a hanging offence. In 1785 the French chemist Claude Berthollet showed that chlorine did in hours what the meadows did in months, and the fields disappeared. That is the reason a plain white cotton is cheap enough today to use as a background instead of saving it for a shirt.
White also carries the most contradictory meanings of any color. In much of Europe and North America it is the color of weddings and new beginnings; across much of Asia it is the color of mourning. Nothing in the pigment says either. White is mostly a blank the culture writes on, which is exactly why it works so well beneath everything else in a quilt.
Where this white works
A solid white is the background fabric. Use it as the light in a half square triangle, the negative space in a modern quilt, the setting squares in a nine patch, the plain blocks in an Irish chain, the sashing between blocks, or the low-volume ground that makes scrappy prints look intentional instead of busy. It is also the natural choice for a quilt label, a signature quilt, or anything you plan to embroider, applique or paint.
At 65 inches it is wide enough to back a quilt up to 57 inches across in one piece, with no center seam to match, press or quilt over. Beyond quilting it makes up well as napkins, a tablecloth, a duvet cover, pillowcases, curtain liners, a tote or an apron.
What to put beside it
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Any print at all, which is the point of keeping white on hand
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Black for the sharpest contrast a quilt can make
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Saturated brights, because white keeps them from fighting each other
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Soft pastels for a light, airy top with plenty of air around the blocks
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Other whites and creams for a low-volume quilt where texture does the work
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Deep navy, forest and burgundy, where white does the separating
Good to know
65 inches is wide, but it is not the 108 inch wide backing sold for king quilts. If you are backing a king, buy the 108 inch wide quilt backing fabric.
Cotton relaxes and shifts a little in the first wash. If the finished piece will be laundered, prewash this along with everything else going into it.
Buy two or more cuts and the quantity discount comes off on its own at checkout. Two cuts take 10% off, four take 15%, six take 20%.
White cotton fabric by the yard, cut and shipped from our own warehouse.
