What is the best fabric for making a quilt?

Cotton is the best fabric for quilts and the one most often used by professional and artisan quilters. If you want a shrink resistant quilt then a polyester/cotton blend will work, as long as the fabric has more cotton than polyester in the blend. Most quilters prefer pure cotton fabrics, they are softer, look nicer and they are easier to "needle" that is -to work the fine hand quilting stitches. 100% cotton should be washed and pre-shrunk before cutting and sewing using the same method of washing as you will use on the finished quilt. Fabric stores have huge varieties of quilting cottons on every colour, tone, shade, print and pattern imaginable. Don't use 100% polyester fabrics, they are slippery, difficult to sew and control when cut into small patchwork shapes, and they are difficult to needle when in the quilting stage. About.com has a good quilting site with lots of helpful information for beginners: a href="http://quilting.about.com/" rel="nofollow"http://quilting.about.com//a