About the mill

Nether Beck Mill has been weaving since 1911. It was built for worsted suiting, spent thirty years on contract upholstery cloth, and now runs as a commission mill: four Dobcross box looms, a warping mill, a dye house and a finishing floor, worked by eleven people.

Why we publish drafts

Most cloth is sold on a swatch photograph and a fibre content. That is enough to choose a colour and not nearly enough to predict behaviour. Whether a fabric will skew on the roll, drape into a corner, snag on a buckle or shine at the elbow is decided by its interlacement — and the interlacement is exactly what a draft records.

So we publish the draft for every cloth we make, and this site computes each swatch from it rather than storing a picture. If the specification changes, the swatch changes with it. It cannot drift out of date, because there is nothing to drift.

Commission work

A bespoke warp starts with a structural sample of about a metre, woven on the table loom, at no charge for trade accounts. From an approved sample the mill runs a minimum of eighty metres. Lead time is eight to ten weeks; less if the warp is one we already hold.

What we will not do

We will not sell a cloth into an application it is wrong for. If you ask for a five-end satin for a dining chair we will tell you it will snag, offer you the drill instead, and lose the order if that is how it goes.