Originally Posted by martha jo
If what they are telling us is true as the supply of fabrics clears out, all the new fabrics will be high because the grey goods are going up in China. Connecting Threads sells American fabric but we do not have many mills left. Maybe they will come back?
If you read carefully what Connecting Threads says about their fabric... they don't say that the fabric is made in the USA, just that the cotton for it is grown in the USA. Now... doing a little more research (here:
http://unctad.org/infocomm/anglais/cotton/market.htm)
you can see that having the cotton grown in the USA is not unusual in that we're the second largest grower of cotton in the world.
But reading further on that link, China is actually the biggest consumer of cotton. And... I suspect it's because China is where the greige goods (raw fabric) is made.
And they do not say where their fabrics are printed, either.
So you have to read between the lines sometimes to get the whole story!
Several years ago someone in the industry informed me that all the cotton combing machinery had left our shores over a decade ago. Thus it's not likely that the industry will return. Even most of the printing is done overseas. Santee is the only company that I know of that still prints in the USA.