We haven't seen any of the brands we carry reduce their width to 40" yet, and haven't been notified of any width reduction either.
Just price increases. :thumbdown:
If you're seeing abnormally wide selvedge edges on the printed side, you've probably got a factory second. Hopefully you got it cheap.
Most batik fabrics are an inch or so narrower to start with, however some are a full 44+" wide. It depends on the buyer's specifications for greige goods to the "factories" making the product.
Some of the problem may come from cutting technique and the way the fabric is doubled. We see a lot of bolts that are unevenly doubled, with one side up to an inch bigger than the other. This means the fold is closer to one side than the other. (This I think is due to ill-trained or sloppy operators on the double and roll machines, or poorly aligned machines. It makes us scream sometimes when fabrics come in all misaligned and/or wrinkled up. When we see multiple examples of this, we report it to the manufacturers and our sales reps. We've even returned fabrics that were horridly rolled. If you're a shop owner, we encourage you to do the same, it's the only way to get them to clean up their act.)
If the bolt is improperly rolled and the person cutting the FQ's just follows the fold on the quarter cut, you'll have one FQ larger than standard and another smaller. So the person cutting the FQ's really needs to even up the two sides before cutting, to make them equal.
Since a lot of FQ patterns depend on a properly-sized FQ, and we sell a lot of batiks, a couple years ago we started cutting all our batik FQ's at 22" rather than 18". We call them "Chubbies." (Cindy named them after me) :mrgreen:
We cut all our non-batik FQ's at 19" to guard against problems in cutting that could possibly occur.
You may pay a little more by shopping at a good online or B&M fabric store, but instead of a corporate bean counter being in charge of how fabrics are cut and sold, it'll be another quilter making the decisions...