Greige Goods

Today's greige goods used in the quilting cotton marketplace are generally '60 square'. This means in a square inch...there are 60 horizontal threads and 60 vertical threads. A 200 count cotton sheet has 200 threads per square inch.

Before the First Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain, most of the ground cloth for printing (of goods for export to the colonies) was from India. In the mid 18th century, the Lancashire region was sending additional bolts of greige goods to London for printing each week. Even then English merchants trying to fill orders for their North American customers still complained of a shortage of printed goods.

My c. 1830 Dargate Book samples are printed on an assortment of ground cloths. Some are very tightly woven...others like the sample below are almost a sheer....with a stripe produced with a slightly different size of thread in the warp...and even an occasional pink dyed  threads for the weft.

 

 

I did reproduce this in a previous Dargate collection. The basic ground cloth was printed to look like the textured plaid of the document piece.