With so many Bed Linen companies vying for your attention, throwing claims of high thread count at you, flooding your social media with millions of different designs, it can get a little overwhelming knowing which bed linen to choose.
Given most things in life are becoming more expensive on an almost daily basis, wouldn’t it be nice to know that you’re spending your hard earned money wisely? But how can you be sure that the quality of the product will live up to your expectations?
At London & Avalon, every new batch of our European woven bed linen is independently tested by a Laundry Technology Engineer team, to ensure it’s up to our exacting standards. We measure each batch against a number of criteria:
- Optical Brightness and Whiteness Reflectance - this calculates how high on the whiteness index our fabric is and determines how white and bright it is to the human eye. You won’t be surprised to hear we score ‘Excellent’ on both scales. We’ve often been told our bed linen can be spotted amongst others in a cupboard just by the whiteness of it.
- Thread Count - we’ve spoken before about the myths of thread count, and how companies falsely elevate theirs by using short cotton staples tied together. We only use the finest individual long cotton staples. When we say 500 - we mean 500.
- Mass/Weight - not much to say here other than the weight of our fabric per square inch is exactly as it should be!
- Dimensional change after washing, or ‘shrinking’. This is an interesting area. How often have you bought an item of clothing, or sheet, only to wash it once and it has completely twisted, or just shrunk? Cotton is a natural fibre, so we cannot stop it from shrinking. However, we have a ‘shrinkage tolerance’ that we insist on working within. This is especially important to our hotel clients who launder our products more frequently and in harsher conditions than we do in our homes. A sample of each batch of fabric is washed 5 times at 75 degrees, and tumble dried between each wash. We’re pleased to say that we are always well within this shrinkage tolerance expected by Healthcare and Hospitality industries. Our products are cut generously to always give you the 'post wash' dimensions you require.
- Tensile strength - this determines the strength of the fabric. The fabric undergoes maximum force and elongation testing in both directions, and as expected, the strength results are ‘Excellent’. You don’t want your beautiful bed linen tearing after a few washes.
Bed linen takes a constant bashing and is really hardworking: you’re in your bed for over 6 hours every night, 365 days a year, often tossing and turning. It’s a good idea to replace your bed linen every week with a fresh set, but often as not, your bed linen goes into a 60 degree cycle for an hour, and then out on the line or into the dryer and then straight back on the bed (maybe with a quick iron in between). So you need to know that your cotton bed linen can take this kind of use!
If these results don’t convince you, the fact that our bed linen is on every bed at The Mandarin Oriental Hotel in London, Paris, Hong Kong and Boston might help.
We value each and every order we receive, and are so thrilled when customers choose to come back to us time and time again. With hundreds of 5 star reviews, and many awards to our name, we hope we can reassure you that our bed linen really is built to last.