Linen Fabric Samples - White and Oatmeal

Linen is difficult to judge on a screen. Oatmeal is the worst of it: it is a mélange, a bleached white yarn woven together with a gray one, so it reads warmer under a lamp and cooler in daylight and no two photographs of it agree. The only honest way to settle the question is to hold the cloth in your own room, in your own light. That is what this is for.

What arrives

A card with a piece of each color — white and oatmeal — in the same 170 GSM linen as every duvet cover, sheet and pillowcase we make. Not a lighter sample cloth, not a different weave: the actual fabric, so what you feel is what turns up on your bed.

What it costs

The samples themselves are free. You pay the postage, and nothing beyond it:

The US rate is higher for one reason: the post office adds a customs handling charge to anything containing goods, and a fabric sample counts as goods. We pass on that charge rather than hiding it in the other rates.

Getting the postage back

In the envelope there is a code for the full amount you paid — €5, €6 or €9, whichever applied. It comes off your first order over €50, one per customer, and it is good for six months. Order anything from us and the samples will have cost you nothing.

How it is sent

As an ordinary letter, without tracking. Tracking would add about €2.50 to a €5 envelope, which is money better left in your pocket. Reckon on a few days inside Latvia, one to two weeks across Europe, and two to four weeks further afield.

If a month passes and nothing has arrived, write to us and we will send another. No questions, no proof required.

Ordering samples and bedding together

The letter rate applies to an envelope, so it is only available when samples are the whole order. Put bedding in the same basket and everything travels together as a normal parcel at the normal rate — which is fine if you have already decided, and beside the point if you have not. Order the samples on their own if you want to look before you choose.

What a sample can tell you — and what it cannot

It will settle the color, the weight in the hand and the texture of the weave, which is most of what people write to ask us about. Two things it will not tell you. It cannot show you how a full width of linen falls, because a small piece has nothing to drape with. And it cannot show you the softness you will end up living with: everything we make is cut 3–5% oversized and softens considerably over its first months of washing, while the sample in your hand is new cloth. Judge the color and the weight from it; take the softness on trust, or on the word of the people who have written to us about it.

The fabric

170 GSM European linen — medium weight, breathable in summer, warm in winter. Certified to OEKO-TEX Standard 100 for fabric and thread. Cut and sewn to order in our workshop near Riga.

More on the color question in what color is oatmeal linen, and the range itself is on linen bedding.