How to Read a Fabric Approval Comment Sheet

The document nobody explains

Between the approved lab dip and the first bulk delivery sits a short, badly formatted document that decides whether your order is right. It has no standard name. Buyers call it a comment sheet, an approval comment, a submission remark or just the comments, and it is usually a handful of lines pasted into an email with dashes and abbreviations and no punctuation to speak of.

It reads like scribble, but every line is an instruction with a consequence attached, and the person who signs it is accepting those consequences on behalf of the whole order. This post takes the kind of lines that actually appear on one and says what each is doing.

Shade lines: what is being compared against what

A shade comment almost always names its reference. A line reading colour versus approved dip and first dye lot is telling you the bulk has been assessed against two separate references at once: the lab dip that was signed off before production, and the first bulk lot already produced. Those can drift apart, which is the whole reason both get named.

Colour OK, no redder is two statements, not one. The first accepts the current submission. The second sets a direction the shade must not move in on anything produced after it. Shade tolerance is not a single circle around a target; it has directions, and a buyer who is sensitive to a garment looking warm will fence off the red side while leaving room on the yellow or the green. If you sign a no redder line, you have accepted the shade and simultaneously narrowed the tolerance for the rest of the order.

This is why a shade approval given verbally or by eye is worth so little. The words carry the direction, and the direction is what a later dispute turns on.

Weight lines: three numbers and a tolerance

A line such as mill submit 152, 150, 147 GSM, OK is a record of three separate submissions against a target, all accepted. It is not a claim that the fabric is any one of those weights. What it demonstrates is spread: the mill has shown what its actual variation looks like across submissions, and the buyer has accepted that spread as within tolerance.

The follow-up instruction that usually accompanies it, ensure bulk fabric weight within tolerance, is doing real work. It converts an accepted sample spread into a standing requirement on the bulk. Read together, those two lines say: your samples varied by five GSM, that was acceptable, and the bulk must not vary further.

The trap is signing the weight line without a tolerance stated anywhere in the specification. An accepted submission is not a tolerance. If the specification does not carry a number and a permitted variation, the comment sheet is the only place the expectation exists, which makes it very hard to enforce later.

Handling lines: hand feel, and why it is the weakest line on the sheet

Hand feel OK is the line most likely to cause an argument, because it records a judgement made by one person holding one piece of cloth. Handle is real and it matters, particularly on anything worn against skin, but it has no scale, no method and no number, so an approval of it cannot be checked later by anyone who was not in the room.

The practical answer is not to delete the line but to anchor it. Approve handle against a retained physical swatch that both sides hold, so a later disagreement is settled by two pieces of cloth rather than two memories.

Instruction lines: the garment face sticker

Please add a garment face sticker on the correct fabric side of each bulk roll is not a shade comment at all. It is a production instruction, and it exists because woven fabric has a face and a back that can be very hard to tell apart on a finished roll, especially on a plain or a fine twill in a mid shade.

If the face is not marked, a cutting room can lay one roll face up and the next face down without noticing. The garments are then assembled from cloth presented two different ways, and the difference shows up as a faint but unmistakable shade or sheen variation between panels of the same garment, or between garments in the same batch. The cloth was correct and the order is still wrong.

A sticker on every roll costs nothing. Catching the mistake after cutting costs the cut work.

How to sign one properly

• Read every line as an instruction with a consequence, not as a status update.
• Check that each shade line names what it was compared against, and note any direction it fences off.
• Confirm that a stated tolerance exists in the specification, not only in the comments.
• Anchor anything subjective, handle above all, to a physical swatch both sides retain.
• Keep the sheet with the order file. It is the record of what was accepted, and it is the first document anyone will ask for if a later batch is disputed.