Road Trip to H.E Box

Today myself and Kelly have made a trip to H.E Box Fabrics in Weymouth to choose our top fabric for the coat and breeches. Prior to the trip we visited our costume archive to study some H.E Box samples and we decided that the fabric was exactly what we needed. The store was also recommended to us by our tutor Graham so we made the trip and explored our options. The store manager was really helpful, he said he supplies a lot of his stock to local town criers so he was really quick to recommend particular fabrics. We had to keep in mind that the colours we are working with are red, white and gold, and the store had a limited amount of tones in those colours. Luckily we found a deep red medium weight melton for the coat and an off white moleskin for the breeches. Seeing as the moleskin is a pale colour we have made a mutual decision to dye the fabric to get a nice antique gold colour. We have already suggested this to Chris and he's more than happy to have gold.
The store manager was very helpful and gave us some good advice due to working with our purchased fabrics. The grain of the Melton lies on the length of the fabric so we will have to make sure that we take good care over cutting it. The fabric only feels smooth if the grain is lying in the right position (downwards) and will be noticeable if the patterns are cut differently. Because of this it meant we had to get quite a lot of fabric, I knew that I was going to need approximately a metre per pattern piece as the width wouldn't accommodate for two. So we had 6.5 metres of Melton cut just to be safe, and 3.5 metres of moleskin.

We are now ready to cut out our pieces in top fabric tomorrow and going by what I have learnt about the fabric today, I am going to allow a whole day to do it.
I'm feeling even more confident about the project now that I have the fabric that I need. It's good to know that I've gained some advice about the fabric along the way and I'm looking forward to putting pattern pieces together at the end of the week.