Adventures in fabric buying

So, yesterday I went to Doncaster to meet a man and talk about reclaimed jersey.

As you may remember, a little while back, we decided that we would only use reclaimed fibres. Our current fabric supplier never gets good enough quality jersey to make pants out of and so this means we can't make jersey pants. While we would love to make jersey pants for women, this particularly means we can't make Man Pants.

One of our supporters, Lisa, suggested a supplier she knew of. He gets lots of what's known as 'cabbage' - over runs of fabrics, end of line stuff. Exactly what we want to make use of. And so I went to see him.

The shop is amazing but so too is the stock room and the tiny roof space where there's all kinds of everything stored. He's got some beautiful blue and pink floral crimplene from the actual 60s, original 70s fabrics and just TREASURE. It was very hard to stick to my mission which was very clear for yesterday. Find one or two *somethings* that we could experiment with. But I managed it! There was actually not that much that was exactly right - I was after jersey, with or without elastane, ideally in basic colours like black, white or any skin tones, or vibrant prints. There was a bunch of white - and that was it.

I've bought us a few metres each of a white cotton jersey without any elastane, and a lingerie grade jersey with elastane. We're going to try them out ourselves, and if we like what we feel, we'll make a very short run of something for you to try too. It's a shame that there was no black as white isn't very popular but it's enough for us to experiment with. And we know that there are good dye houses in England so we could consider dying it into good colours too.

As you know we love knowing what you think. What do you reckon? How would pants in a non elastane jersey be for you in maybe Cecilia or Rosalind style - or maybe a lace leg Cecilia, or perhaps even a short? What about dying - would you be happy if we dyed stuff to make it usable?

More on this as we find out!