McCall Printing Facility

[Gernella]

Interesting:

https://craftindustryalliance.org/mccall-printing-facility-out-of-commission-since-mid-october-causes-delays/?fbclid=IwAR2ZtaaKFIXT24wHeXCok_YM9FY92cfdrmvF3dmw498JhlxdlWOUlnzkcYg

Not good not spreading your risk.

[Tamnymore]

Very interesting @Gernella . Well done for finding this. I had been wondering why we hadn't yet seen any winter/holiday release from Vogue with all the sparkly party frocks but I had assumed it waa the covid crisis. Sounds like they and other pattern companies are in a pickle.

[Acorn]

Time to make more patterns available as PDFs, surely!

[Tamnymore]

Yes it must be a lot cheaper for pattern companies to do pdfs. I do use digital patterns but they do take an age to print out (on my ancient printer) and stick together. Hopefully tissue patterns won't disappear altigether   

[Greybird]

I shall have to preserve all my old patterns very carefully! I would have to give up altogether if it meant sticking all those ghastly pieces of paper together.

[mudcat]

One would think the pattern companies who have shop copy versions would be able to contract with pdfplotting or another pattern printing source.  At least their customers will have options.

Still it's rather surprising to me that they have no backup software to deal with this.  Very poor IT practice. When I still worked we did regular disaster recovery exercises.  Evidently some places don't do this.

[UttaRetch]

I don't buy the cyber attack story.  I think the takeover has not gone smoothly and something that screwed that nobody knows how to fix.

[Gernella]

To be honest @Tamnymore I saw it mentioned on Pattern Review.  I had noticed that they have started doing digital patterns, which I'd never noticed before, maybe this is why.

There do seem to be many pattern printing sites setting up, so  is this just an excuse so they can make life easier and cheaper for the company and get rid of a few jobs.

[Marniesews]

Is this the first time?

Earlier this year I noticed all the Bluprint classes that included a pattern were inaccessible and was told it was a problem with the pattern supply which looked as though it might take months to resolve. It was at least a couple of months before I was messaged to say it was available again. Hard to remember, it was around the time of the first lockdown when time was even harder to estimate than it is now.

All the Jalie patterns are printed on substantial paper rather than tissue and is my preference as I like to trace off individually which has the added benefit of being able to blend different sizes together for a bit of customised fitting from the start. Not good news for those who like tissue fitting though.