My visit to the sewing factory

Well, folks, since I have no new stock this week, thought I'd share my recent trip with you. Most of us rarely if ever get to go inside a factory anymore (liability, terrorism and all), and probably most people have no idea how sewn products are actually made. I had some idea from doing lots of research on getting diapers made but still had never seen a sewing factory in person.

The sewing factory that is working on the Solo Flyers is located in the US, and the workers are proud of what they do. The company president is a woman, and she was familiar with cloth diapers too! Let me show you around...

First, fabric is spread on long, long tables (like maybe 50 feet...I'm bad at estimating), and it is spread multiple plies thick. They work on several different orders on these long tables at any one time. Then the cutters use a vertical electric blade to slice through the thick stack of fabric to cut out the pattern pieces. I don't know if you can see it in the photo, but the gentleman in front is wearing a chain metal glove to protect his hand from the blade - that's how sharp it is.


Next the cut pieces are loaded into tubs (those brown containers in the pic below) and sent to the stitchers. As you can see, they work in a large, airy, well-lit space, and each stitcher has her or his own station. No child labor here!


Finally, the sewn goods go to a quality control table for inspection and packing.

It was a lot of fun to meet the good people who will be working on my project. They will be starting a small run of diapers next week, to learn this new-to-them product before scaling up to a larger batch. I like this careful approach and attention to detail and I will be so excited to share these diapers with you!