The cloth and the filling

In home textiles the cloth is bought before the design is finished, and this single fact reorders the whole calendar. Greige cloth is woven to a width and a construction and only then dyed, printed and finished. The mill books loom time and yarn for your construction months ahead; your artwork joins the process much later. That is why a home textile lead time is quoted from yarn and greige booking rather than from artwork approval, and why moving your print two weeks late usually does not move your ship date but changing your construction always does.

The yarn decides the hand. Count, ply and preparation: carded, combed or compact. A single ply 40s and a two ply 40s are completely different cloths at completely different prices. If you want to understand what sits underneath a cloth price, the fabric part of the raw materials guide builds one from its parts, and the fabric weight calculator turns any construction into grams so you can check that a quoted weight and a quoted construction agree with each other.

For the shape of a sensible first question, which cloth for which item on the specification step gives the usual cloth for each of eleven common products, the measure that product is actually bought on, which changes from item to item, and the range that measure normally sits in.

A filling is a separate purchase. On a quilt, a duvet or a pillow you are buying two things: the shell, which is cloth, and the fill, which is not. Down and feather are quoted by fill power and by the down to feather ratio; synthetic fill is quoted by fibre type, by weight and by whether it is siliconised. The shell must be woven tightly enough that the fill does not work through it, which is a construction and a calendering decision made at this step and impossible to fix later. Fill leaking through a shell is the most common complaint on filled bedding there is.

Rugs are a third thing again. Woven, tufted and printed rugs are different products with different economics, and they clear customs under different lines. Woven man made pile rugs currently enter the United States at free while the same goods face 8.00% in Britain, both read 1 September 2026, which is one of the widest gaps on the whole home textile table.