I’ve been trying to find a king-size duvet cover that isn’t horribly floral and accompanied by unnecessary pillow cases, but so far no joy. Then I thought: why not make one? The joy of being able to sew is that whenever you can’t find what you want you can make it at home for nothing! Though perhaps not with a small aubergine… Actually it’s often more expensive when you make it at home, which brings into focus the problems with the entire clothing industry being highly exploitative – but there’s no doubt it’s infinitely more satisfying. The trouble is that most fabrics are 45 or 60 in wide and I need 225 cm which is nearly 89 inches. (Have a lot of sites gone back to inches since Brexit? There seem to be a lot more imperial measures around than there were.) So that means the cover will have to have a seam down the middle, which isn’t ideal. I’ve found one place that does fabric 165 cm wide but the website is very hard to navigate and won’t let you delete things from your shopping cart, so I’ve left it for a while.
I’m feeling a bit spaced this morning. I had a weird night; I was tired enough when I went to bed but then woke at 2.30 and felt as if I’d had totally enough sleep. This being illogical I tried to get back to sleep but without much success and ended up dozing fitfully for the next four hours. The thought occurs: could this be the end of the fatigue? Have I finally actually had enough rest? We shall see.
At the top right-hand corner of my screen there are several widgets. I think they’re called widgets, though I have only the vaguest idea of what a widget is – anyway, they’re like browsing bouncers, summarily ejecting unwanted visitors from my pages. There’s good old adblocker turning away unwanted ads; next to him there’s privacy badger who stops me from being tracked across the internet (this is quite a scary phenomenon; I’ll casually click on a link on Facebook selling, say, kids toys, and the next thing I know children’s toys are following me everywhere. But now I just watch privacy badger rack up numbers telling me how many attempts to follow me have been blocked (between email and wordpress it racked up 6 attempts. Scary.)
I think I’m going to have to go into Leicester for my fabric. Unless anyone knows a really good website?
Kirk out
Sarada Gray 
I can’t help with the website, I’m afraid: it might just be a combination of trial & error, persistence and pot luck that gives you what you’re looking for. Time-consuming, but rewarding nonetheless. I can’t really comment on the metric/imperial situation commercially, but my own view is that a return to imperial [sorry: no capital] weights & measures would be retrograde: I’ve been working with metric lengths & areas since I was at college [so nearly 50 years: wow!], litres for fluids doesn’t merit a thought, and I think I’ve just about got the hang of gm/kg, so I don’t want to be doing with all those 12ths and fractions again, thanks very much 😉 Blinkered revisionism can be so tiresome. Cheers, Jon.
Metric makes a lot more sense, unlike inches, feet and yards
Mind you, i will confess to an irrational attachment to the humble pint of beer
I am still rooted in Imperial measures.. I have to check with a tape measure to see how big something is in centimetres.I also use old phrases for other conversions. Like this one.
“A litre of water is a pint and three-quarter’. And I still call a kilo bag of sugar ‘Two pounds of sugar’.
Best wishes, Pete.
Ebay or Amazon is where I would look. You might find what you’re looking for. Nothing beats a fail but a try as my mother would often say. ✌️