[Dick Finn]

After my haircut, I walked across the street to the Woolgatherers and had a real nice conversation with the owner. It was obvious from the start that she really knew what she was talking about. She has had a fairly large shop in the downtown area for the past six years. She has huge supplies of looms and weaving materials. She sells these to hobbiests and manufacturers cloth to order. She showed me a number of products she wove from loosly wooven scarfs to very tightly woven car upholstery fabric (Fond du Lac has a large population of car restoration hobbyists). She has a large number (10 or more) looms of varying sizes, all with projects in progress.

I showed her the grill cloth from my 42 -PT66. This was a loosely woven six by six inch square for a table top radio. There was no pattern. This gave her some idea as to what we were looking at. Her comments were:

1. If we were firm on using period threads it would be very difficult. Even though the original fiber may be a synthetic it would be hard to come by as the technology has moved well beyond the older synthetics. If we could accept natural fibers or modern synthetics that were matched fairly closely she could do the work.

2. Doing individual small orders would not be practical due to the set up time. Things would not become cost effective till we reached an order of 10 to 20 yards. For example, the six inch wide piece I showed her could be done for about $29/yard (six inches by 36 inches). The more complex patterns and wider pieces would obviously be more expensive.

3. Lead time to deliver 20 yards of a pattern would be 1.5 to 2 months.

4. Ideally, she would need a swatch of the fabric as a sample. A good quality color scan might also do the job.

5. She would like to get a number of different patterns to determine if the warp (or was it woof) threads were the same. If so, she could do a production run for a number of the patterns with one set up.

The way we left it was that I would provide this information to everyone to determine the interest level. If you are interested in buying cloth for your projects, please send me a private message indicating the number of yards and cloth number.

I would also try to determine what the most common and in demand patterns would be and I would get a sample of them for her. Ron, perhaps you could help me with coming up with the more common grill cloth numbers. Also, would you have samples of the material.

Once I get some solid data as to what we need and the number of yards of each, I would go back to her and get an estimate. I can act as the middle man on this by ordering a large amount and breaking it down into individual orders.