I sat up in bed wide awake at 2.57am the other morning....

absolutely convinced that our whole production run was so wrong that it was going to be a disaster! It brought me upright and wide awake withing a second in a cold sweat :). 

I had woken early the day before and put the size guide together and published it on the website.  Then it was off to one of the makers to go through the elastic and waistbands on the 3/4 active and swoosh pants (making sure that they put the right elastic in and that it wasn't to tight or too loose and that the channels it sat in were perfect). I then picked up the bike shorts and active 3/4 pants from another maker and took them back to the shop. We commented that the bike shorts waist looked rather small but as the samples had fitted well, we put it down to being an optical illusion as they are in grey and the sample was in black. My brain must have been ticking over it through the night though as when I woke all I could think of was that the waist size I had published for an 18 was 85cm which is also the most popular size in belts for size 8-10 ladies. 

Panic on!  Frantic emails to the pattern maker ensued along with me running around with a tape measure checking every one in sight to see what they were (no objections allowed). We also checked a range of other size guidelines which all concurred with our size guide.  I have to say at this point that I am a sceptic of size guides though as we sell breeches in waist sizes of 26", 28", 30" etc which bears no resemblance to actual waist size, and I have long wondered about that.  It may have one day but doesn't today.  Any way we measured our waistbands and they didn't agree with our size guides either, so we have altered  the size guide.  This fashion business seems downright weird to me at times - guides that don't really mean what they say...

Any way that is the story of how our guidelines show real waist sizes -give or take 5cm due to elastic and the stretch fabric that we use!