Originally Posted by JanetM
All manufacturers produce many bolts of fabric during their design process. They are testing the colors and prints to get everything just right. These goods are called griege goods. Once the manufacturer is satisfied with the print and colors he then produces his 1st quality goods.
The greige goods have a lower thread count (just like bed sheets) and the dyes are not as stable. The "cotton" they use during this testing process is made of short cotton fibers instead of the long staple fibers used in their final production of 1st quality goods.These inferior goods are then sold to discount stores...WalMart, Hancock's, etc.
Your local quilt store buys 1st quality fabric (atleast I have never heard of one buying greige goods). The same holds true for many online sources, such as EQuilter, Keepsake Quilting, Hancocks-Paducah.
I beg to differ. I think there's some confusion about what greige goods are. Wanting to be sure, before I posted, I looked up what the definition was and this is what I found at
http://textileglossary.com/terms/greige-goods.html:
(pronounced 'gray') - An unfinished fabric, just removed from a knitting machine or a loom. Loom state of cloth that has not received dry and wet finishing.
An unfinished fabric, just removed from a knitting machine or a loom. Also called grey goods.
Fabric in the raw state, before dyeing or finishing processes.
Grey fabric- Raw fabric, before it is bleached and processed.
So... greige goods is just unfinished fabric (which is what I thought). There will be many different qualities of greige goods, with different thread counts, more or less slubs in the weave, different fiber contents etc.
The manufacturers do "strike-offs", which is a test printing of their design. If the quality of the strike-off is acceptable, then they go ahead with the full production run. I don't know *all* of what the manufacturers are checking with the strike-off, but I assume it just has to do with the quality of the printing (colors, screens) and does not have anything to do with the finishing, which is a completely separate step.
I don't know what happens to the goods produced by strike-offs, other than they sometimes wind up in the hands of the fabric companies' sales reps as small samples. Sometimes they go to pattern designers, to make "real" quilt samples for use in selling the patterns. (I used "real" to note the difference between an actual physical quilt, and a "picture" of a quilt made using design software.)
It can happen that a supposed "good" production run turns out to have flaws in it, maybe a repeating unprinted spot in the fabric, or maybe the wrong greige goods were loaded into the printing machine. I really don't know what happens to those! Sometimes, unfortunately, it's the LQS at the end of the line that finds and reports the problem. (I've had to do that a few times.)
I hope this information is of some help!