In our shop we have carried several tree skirt panels, and they way they're printed is that they are in half-circles, and you need two half-circles in order to make a full tree skirt. We'd never sell just one half-circle (how silly!); we sell them as a unit which includes two half-circles, and describe it as such. And, of course, it makes the retail price "scary-high", until you read the details and find out that the unit includes TWO yards of fabric, and then the price makes sense.
But of course, it makes you wonder why the fabric manufactures don't just print it as one full circle. And the answer to that probably lies in the nature of the printing process.
Fabrics today are generally printed using rotating cylindrical drums, each of which contains the design for a single color. (So if a fabric has 12 different colors on it, there will be 12 cylinders needed to produce the pattern.) Commonly the cylinders are either 24" or 36" in circumference, and the length will be 44" or 60" or whatever the width of the fabric is. Those troublesome tree skirt panels are usually on 60" wide fabric, and each half-circle is printed on one yard of cloth. If they were to print it as a full circle, then they'd need to have cylinders that were 60" in circumference. It might be that nobody makes cylinders that big, or perhaps such big cylinders would not fit onto the printing machine... or, if they did, well, you couldn't fit as many cylinders onto it, so then you could not have as many colors in the finished design. This is just a semi-educated guess; if any readers have experience in the screen-printing business they might be able to answer more surely. Anyway... I'm attaching a picture that I found online of one of these printing machines so you can get an idea of what they look like.
As to why a store would price it per-repeat, that would probably be for two reasons: first, if they priced it per two-yard unit it makes the price very high, and second (and more likely, I think) is that the sales staff and customers are used to seeing fabric priced per yard, and there'd be confusion all around if it was priced per some other unit. You'd have to have thoroughly well-trained staff to be able to deal with some fabrics being sold by-the-yard and others by different units. Ummm... from reading all the posts... I'd say that would not be very likely to happen at the chain stores. Regrettably.
As I recall, all the times I've shopped in the chains, fabrics are priced by the yard only. And if you're buying a print with, say, blocks of animals on it, and you don't want your bunnies beheaded, it's up to you to tell the clerk what fraction of a yard you want to buy. Otherwise they'll just cut the fabric wherever the scissors land.
In our store, for any fabric that has a design such that you wouldn't want it cut "randomly", we price and sell it per pattern repeat, so that our customers don't ever have to pay for unusable bits. That means some prints are sold by the foot, or by the 2/3 yard repeat. And yes, the staff does have to be "on their toes", paying attention when they cut the fabric... but I'm blessed to have smart, alert, conscientious workers. They're well-trained, and we always have plenty of coffee, tea, and chocolate available to help maintain alertness. (Tee-hee!)
rotary screen printing machine
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