The art of making cloth, textile patterns and bedding is an ancient and world wide trade. We have chosen to make our bedding and bed linen close to home so that we can ensure great quality and be as hands on as we can in the creation and production of our products. There are many many different stages to making our various linens and bedding, it takes a whole three months from us placing an order with our factory in Portugal until the finished bundles of bed linen reach us. Our bedding is made to order, the fillings added by hand before we wrap it up and send it to you within just 2 weeks of ordering.
Have you ever thought about your bedding, where it comes from and how it is created? Here we'll attempt to explain a little about our production process and how your bedding is made. It's really quite amazing and we're still learning 20 years on.
Weaving
Once we have chosen our designs and colours (we don't always agree) it's time to start weaving. If you're not familiar with textile weaving, it's fascinating stuff. The fabrics are woven on huge machines called "looms". The loom has to be threaded with the warp colour yarn, and this take 2 men a whole day to manually complete. Once the loom is ready, the weaving can begin, and fortunately, these days we have computerised looms, that program the pattern weaving into the fabric. The loom works really quickly and can produce a surprising amount of fabric in a short space of time.
Finishing & Cutting
The fabric is then washed and soften and dyed (if it needs to be) in a process which we call "finishing". The transformation from 'loomstate' fabric to the fabric that is used for the bed linen is quite something. Once finished, it is all checked thoroughly for any flaws in the material before it goes off to the cutting room. The fabric is cut from the roll into the right sizes and shapes for each size of duvet covers, sheets and pillowcases. We use big trollies to move all of the cut fabric to the sewing machines, to be transformed into your sheets.
Hemming & Sending
The final stage of the process is the hemming the fabric into the finished bundles of bed linen. Care and attention is taken sewing everything together, checking the sizing and adding our buttons and labels. The finished items are then steamed and perfectly folded, and popped it in it's packet (not as easy as it sounds), boxed up and ready to arrive at our little warehouse, and eventually onto your bed.
Hand Filled Duvets and Pillows
All of our bedding is hand made to your specific order as soon as we receive it from you. Making it this way helps us to offer you much more choice, and most importantly, means that you get a fresh product that has not already spent time in a big warehouse or travelling around the world. Our factory is in Scotland, we hold all of our various fillings in stock, including goose or duck feather and down of synthetics, and make the items as the orders come in. Fillings are loaded into big machines, before being blown into the pockets of your bedding. The machine is cleverly designed to weigh each pocket of filling, so that we know the tog or support in each item is just perfect. Our duvets and pillows are then wrapped only in a thin plastic bag (we have tried to avoid this but large white items are extremely difficult to keep clean) before being packed up in a re-usable canvas bag and on the way to you. Find out more about how we make our bedding here.
Take a look at our short video in our Portuguese factory, and see for yourself. If you want to know more about choosing your bed linen, read our buying guide.
