If you have a Tuesday Morning store in your area, you’re in luck. They’re a discount store with a huge textile department, with towels and sheets of every description possible. That’s where I buy my 800tc bedsheets and egyptian cotton bath towels at a serious discount. You can also buy bedsheets made from bamboo, which feels like a very silky form of jersey sheets which I also like.
Well, I just got back from Tuesday Morning. The best we could do today were 600tc Egyptian cotton sets and no bamboo in stock. 
I was anxious to try the bamboo blend based on a bamboo sweater I felt a few months ago. It was a little bit of heaven.
Nonetheless, we’ll wash these this week and have them on the bed in the next few days. I’ll report in after a few nights with my review.
Where else but on the SDMB could you run across a “former cotton buyer for a major textile company that made high end sheeting”? Thanks, hockeymonkey!
Some serious sig potential there.
We have a waterbed frame, but also use the box springs, so our bed is very tall.
Anyway.
I can use both type sheets, and am going to dust off my sewing machine and attach the regular sheets to each other as well.
Stoopid crawling sheets, trying to run away.
I wanted to touch the subject of ‘burlap’ sheets. You know, every “cute” kid’s sheet set, every printed set I’ve seen in the last 10-15 years, is just like this. In the 70s, kids’s bedsheets were made of really nice cotton. I still have some McDonald’s character sheets (very worn and faded now) and they’re soft and lovely to touch. Go in any thrift store and handle the character sheets with current-theme characters (Teletubbies, Pokemon, Spiderman etc). they’re all this horrible coarse stiff fabric that doesn’t even soften with washing. So my kids get ordinary plain colored sheets…something I’d sleep on.
But I don’t get the appeal of jersey. I tried them once and they wouldn’t stay on the bed, so no matter how comfy they are, the annoyance factor outweighed it all. Maybe I bought the wrong brand?
If I could afford it, I’d get bamboo (woven, not knit). I have a couple of bamboo t-shirts and they’re heavenly.
Hockey Monkey, can you perhaps shed some light on which fabrics are compatible with cat-hair? As in that the fabric doesn’t attract and hold cat hair? So far I haven’t seen any systematics in what fabric will and what won’t.
And is it true that percal was the stuff those cheaper, softer 70’s sheets were made from? I find that percal feels much softer; what are the downsides?
the jerseys are nice and very breathable. i do check out the off-price stores for sheets. you can get a lovely sheet set with a high count for very, very, nice prices.
the jersey sheets do breathe and do nicely in hot and cold weather. the more you wash them the more they feel like an old comfy tee shirt.
A percale weave feels like sandpaper to me. I don’t know what weave was popular in the 70’s for kid’s sheets, though repeated washings will soften sheets if given enough time. I think 30 years should be sufficent. 
As far as the cat hair problem, it will stick more readily to flannel or jersey sheets. The higher the thread count, the tighter the threads are jammed together, giving the cat hair less “purchase” as it were. If the cat hair can’t get inbetween the threads, it will wipe off easily.
hockeymonkey, I do have a related question. What makes sheet so blasted expensive? For all practical purposes, they are a flat piece of fabric with maybe a hem or two and a little elastic. To pay $150+ for two pieces of fabric seems like highway robbery to me.
I’ll try to do my best to explain. It pretty much comes down to time and material costs. Egyptian and Supima cottons are the most expensive cottons to begin with, so 100% cotton items made with these cottons will be more expensive. To get the fibers from the raw state or bale to a final product is very very labor intensive. The processes are as follows:
Laydown/Opening - the bales are placed in a precise order according to bale grade and a machine runs over them picking up a little bit off each bale as it goes, starting the blending process. The bales must be blended together to ensure a uniform product.
Carding - the cotton is blown into a big machine that has a several giant cylinders with lots of saw teeth on them that aligns the fibers all in the same direction and puts the cotton in a rope-like form to use in the next process.
Combing - the material from the carding process is further processed to align fibers and remove fibers that are shorter than the desired length.
Drawing - more fiber aligning and blending (if the cotton is being blended with a polyester or other fiber, it occurs here. From the drawing process the cotton can go straight to a spinning machine. There are several types of spinning processes that I am familiar with. Ring spinning, Air Jet spinning, and Open-end spinning. If the yarn being made is with the air jet or open-end process, spinning is the next step after drawing.
Roving - Ring spun yarn must go through this process to make the “rope” diameter smaller.
Spinning - the cotton is made into a yarn. Ring spinning is the longest process and is the only way to produce yarns that are thin enough to make into 1000 tc sheets. The machines have to run much slower for the high count yarns and thus the production is lower. Meaning they cost more.
Warping - if the yarn is going to be woven it has to be placed on a warp. This is the process of putting the yarn on a big roll. There is a little bit more involved that’s hard to explain, but as the final warp is being made there are chemicals applied in a process called Slashing. These chemicals (or sizing) are to give the yarn a little extra strength to cut down on broken ends in weaving.
The last step in our process was the Weaving where the actual fabric is made and spooled on to huge rolls. You’ve probably noticed that sheets are made with one solid piece of fabric instead of smaller pieces sewn together. The wider the fabric is (like King sized sheets) the harder it is to weave. The picks have to travel much further across the warp, the looms have greater chance of stopping because of a broken pick (that’s the piece of yarn that goes across), and it’s harder for the loom operator to repair. Result is a higher cost. Twin size sheet widths aren’t too difficult.
So as you can see, lots of processes and people involved in just the fabric manufacturing, before the fabric can even be called a sheet. The fabric still has to be de-sized, dyed or printed, cut and sewn, packaged and shipped to a store. Still more people to pay. That was probably way more information than you needed, but it was a nice mental excercise for me. It’s been quite a few years since I’ve had to know any of that stuff. 
Well, there is certainly more to making a good quality fabric than I had considered. It’s far too easy for the uneducated me to compare the price of sheets which constitute a few straight seams to the fact that I can buy an entire shirt from Walmart for $3.00 that takes a great deal more to assemble.
Plus, you mentioned upthread that the Egyptian cottons were harvested by hand. Holy moly. I had no idea.
Thanks again Hockey Monkey (capped right this time…sorry) for combating my ignorance!
I’m glad the information was finally useful!