A whopping four decades I’ve been in the business
— even though I am ONLY going on fifty 🙂 —
and gads if this hasn’t taught me a huge lesson.

Never, ever, ever tell a client something is going to be easy.

In replicating the flag, we need to obtain two items:
a good replacement for the gold passementerie, and
the green silk for the flag.
I told our clients, the DAR, in passing that the passementerie might be difficult,
but to find the green silk would be easy-peasy.

NOT.

Mind you, I said this knowing that we have all of Sunsilks many colors
including several gorgeous greens in that range, a foresty-grass-green.  Viridian.
Plus we have a basket of greens from many other houses, because we match solid colors all the time, and saw at least another dozen of THESE EXACT green silks.

Discontinued or only in nubby dupioni!

We had one good choice but after ordering a test sample found it was out of stock and
not discontinued, per se, but just not going to be reordered.
*sigh*

The fabric industry transformed in the last decade into a fairly unpredictable industry.
We no longer ask clients to choose one fabric, but one-two-three,
because even if we just ordered samples,
the fabric might be gone within a short period of time!
Companies do not have lines that are crayola box colorful; they rely on color trends.
*I’m sick of turquoise and brown, and will be just as sick of the next “it” color trend.
Sick of pastels too!*

So the hunt for the right green silk began.  We started again with our top showrooms,
but instead of asking for a particular sample we asked for a range of solid green silks.
We began working our way into smaller and smaller showrooms and fabric companies.
I sent out the image of the five silks above for the color, and we also described the silks:
Not nubby, not too shiny, not a shot silk, preferably 100% silk, substantial,
a shantung or taffeta, and would look at a dupioni if not too textural.

Some of the choices sent I simply don’t understand —
perhaps they went by the name of a fabric, like Dublin?

So here we are, in the midst of SO many greens, and not one that fit.
I have to admit I was giving up and getting discouraged and tearing hair…
then Mitchell said ONE MORE TIME, and a month later…
We also opened the search up to silk + cotton, or silk + linen.

Three inches of stacked rejects… seven dozen green silks…
Three months of calling and visiting showrooms and
sorting and online looking and begging for one last lookaround…

And finally, we have contenders.
We will run our tests, evaluate (and honestly we have three stragglers coming),
order the rest of the duplicates, and then off to the DAR for final review.

WHEW.
Moral of the story, never say it will be easy!

To begin at the beginning, visit Washington State Flag, 1.

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