Bra-makers Supply colorways

This is not related to anything I'm currently working on, but I've been meaning to write it up for a while.

Bra-makers Supply is a (the?) Canadian online vendor of lingerie supplies. I've yet to buy any large amount from them, but one of their main features is they have certain colors for which they sell matching fabrics, elastics, and notions.

This addresses a major problem with home sewing in general: we usually don't have our notions dyed to match; we just have to choose from whatever standardized, or miscellaneous, colors someone has decided to manufacture. This is an even worse problem with bras, because they have so many components made of different materials. It's easy to get stuck with near-miss color matches, plain black or white, or contrasting colors when you'd rather use only one.

Here is Bra-makers' Duoplex swatch set:

Duoplex is one of their nonstretch fabrics that you'd use for cups. They do swatch sets for other fabrics too; I just got this one because it had the widest range of colors available. (Unfortunately, this is photographed in artificial light, and the brightness and clarity of most of the colors doesn't come across.)

Keep in mind, the range of colors for which elastic and closures are available, at time of writing anyway, is much more limited: pink, a couple beige shades, dark brown, ivory, white, red, and black, and I think just recently they've added fuchsia and turquoise. I personally am not a big fan of all the brights and clear pastels, and wish they'd do more of the muted or dark colors (they've got a dark plum, dark green, two grays, and two sorts of navy, but no matching notions for them). Still, being able to get color-matched, more-or-less continuously available fabric and notions at all is a big deal.

Anyway, the other nice thing Bra-makers does is list Pantone numbers, at least for their standard fabrics and elastics (not so much for their laces). If you have the Fashion & Home deck, although matching fabric to paper is not ideal, you can look those up. And while I think they've tried their best to match colors to numbers, in some cases the Pantone deck just doesn't have a great match.

Here the Pink is a decent match for the Pantone color they chose (right below it). The Mid-tone Grey, not so much: the fabric definitely has more of a red-violet cast. But looking through the deck, I could see that was arguably the best match available. The White is a real optic white that is brighter than anything in the deck, though newer decks may have a better match than older ones, as they can yellow or dull with age. Anyway, my point is: this is good enough to get a general idea, but if you're going to try to match anything to Bra-makers' colors, and you're as picky about it as I am, you're best off getting a swatch set. The other advantage is it's much lighter and easier to carry around.

One of these days I want to write up a big comparison of several lingerie supply vendors. Generally speaking, I would say Bra-makers is good for relatively unadorned bras, and they consider a big range of sizes. In comparison, some of the European vendors have much prettier lace, but none of them do the custom-dye thing as far as I know, and their fabrics may need some backing to be supportive enough for the larger sizes. More on all this later.