The thing with buying reclaimed fabrics is.. – Who Made Your Pants?

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The thing with buying reclaimed fabrics is..

Posted by Becky John on August 26, 2015

Most of the time when we buy our reclaimed fabrics, they are 100% perfect condition. We (and you) wouldn't buy them if they weren't.

Occasionally, we find some oddness.

One lovely lime and pink fabric we'd bought was, on unrolling it, discovered to have a thick white line every metre or so along the fabric. This made it completely unusable for us. Sometimes we'll find fabric that has a big big hole in the middle very five metres or so from where it has been previously laid out on a big cutting table that has a hole in the middle for a cutter to pop up through and work from. And sometimes there are dye issues or little runs, ladders, that mean we have to lose a certain amount of fabric. That's all ok, we can work around that.

Sometimes we find that what we thought was a continuous run of fabric is actually a series of smaller pieces wound onto a roll. That can have a big knock on effect to how many we can cut from it - I always think of it as being like cutting pastry out. If you have a big round piece, you can fit in loads of small shapes. If that big round piece is cut into four, you immediately lose a lot of your flexibility.

Just recently, we were using some purple edge lace. We'd used it on a run of 95 Cecilia Sew Sew Dotty ( that link won't work until we launch the Pants on Friday 28th) Pants and were attaching it to a run of 47 Rosalind Dotty for Purple ( that link won't work until we launch the Pants on Friday 28th) Pants. And we found that there wasn't enough in the right lengths to make our Rosalinds. There were small lengths but not enough to do all the legs and the waists.

And we'd already started - we'd made the size 8, 10 and some of the 12s.

So we scratched our heads. Our choices were to scrap the whole run - we wouldn't launch half the sizes. Or to come up with something creative.

And that's what we did. We decided to use the Red edge lace we used for Chiliberry and Plumberry Salsa. We'd already had the photography done of the samples so there wasn't time to get new ones done - so we hope you will make do with our inexpert shots here!

All size 8 and 10 Pants are edged with purple lace

Some of the size 12 Pants will be edged with Purple lace and some with Red

All size 14, 16 and 18 are edged with red lace.

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Comment on this post (2 comments)
- liz says...
  
  “
  
  Make do and mend attitude - good thinking WMYP
  
  August 29, 2015
- Jenni says...
  
  “
  
  I absolutely love this problem-solving attitude. Waste not, want not. You guys are the best.
  
  August 28, 2015
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