Skip to main content

Are your fabrics made of cotton? Burn test will tell you!

After laundry, vacuum cleaning, a bit of clothes folding and my Nespresso machine descaling (uff I'm tired!), I decided to test whether two pieces of fabric I bought 10 days ago (or maybe more, time flies!) are 100% cotton...

How so? Let me start from the beginning... few weeks ago I decided to start a pretty nice (but likely highly unsuccessful at least for me) project: making rice heating pads without a sewing machine !
You can use heating pads to warm up your feet, hands, and bed linen too! You can warm them up in the oven or in the microwave....with a caveat: they have to be made of cotton or any other natural fiber that doesn't burn as soon as you put it into the oven/microwave !!!
Heating pads are very useful for winter time and I'd like to make some for two people I love.

As first thing I went to a haberdashery and bought two colourful fabric stripes! I washed them and then, only then, asked myself whether they were made of cotton....

I looked on the internet and found that the easiest way to do understand that is to proceed with the burning test!

Take a candle or a lighter, forceps to hold the fabric swatch, and do it in the safest way as possible! Don't use plastic containers, keep salt at your fingertips just in case...



Put the fabric swatch close (not onto) the flame and observe... if it's cotton it doesn't shrink away from the flame, it will glow while burning, it will release a light grey smoke, ash will be fluffy and easy to disintegrate!



For more info about other fabrics please refer to this amazing video

Comments

Popular posts

Card making and papercraft magazines

Last month I had the chance to get, for the first time, a couple of Cardmaking & papercraft  magazines: Papercraft Inspirations and Make Christmas card magazine. Papercraft Inspiration December issue had a Christmas window build-a-scene embossing folder and stamp free gift, as well as  free festive papers . Make Christmas cards was offering:  2 embossing folder borders ,  13 stylish stamps ,  32 Christmas papers ,  12 découpage sheets ,  117 toppers & motifs and  73 festive greetings. Here you have some of the cards and tags I've made with the magazines' gifts All cards have been donated to hospitals 

One more way to combine soy wax and gel!

The followings are all two-layered candles with the bottom layer made of gel and the upper part made of soy wax . Why combining the two of them? Because gel is transparent and allows you to embed objects   and soy wax   has an incredible  scent   throw and a long burning time ! Few simple rules for embedding objects: ideally they should be non flammable (like glass animals, shells or stones)! ...but if you do not exaggerate with the amount, you also can potentially use cinnamon sticks, dried flowers etc... To be on the safe side: if you use flammable objects I'd anyway suggest you to pour the thinnest layer of gel as possible (just to cover the embeds) and avoid burning this layer. And remember: never ever leave lit candles unattended! Let yourself be inspired and give it a try! Gel embeddings: glitters (blue candle) or sea shells (peach candle). Soy wax: caramel-scented.   G el embeddings: cinnamon sticks G el embeddings: cinna...