The Ledger.

The button samples from Padano have arrived and they're beautiful. The matte finish is really nice, and the engraving round the edge is crisp and accurate.

Twenty metres of Ventile have been quilted with the wool and delivered to the factory in Bolton, ready for the first sample.

I'm working with the team at Padano on the buttons. I'm getting some samples through and I'm aiming for something with a flat edge that resembles the pound coins I remember from my childhood in the 80s.

I'm hoping to find a natural horn option and want to laser engrave it round the edge rather than on the face, again, like a pound coin.

The details are settled. The same cuffs and hidden storm cuffs as the quilted jacket, the same neck loop as the peacoat, square-cornered chest pockets and a 1.5cm topstitch on the hip pockets. Inside, welt pockets like the peacoat's: two on one side, one on the other.

I've asked my pattern cutter to start on a trucker jacket. If it comes together quickly, I can launch two jackets before the year is out.

The wadding has been made 200cm wide instead of 150cm, and Caledonian's machines can only quilt up to 150cm. It's being cut down in Blackburn before it goes anywhere near Bolton.

Sample two is back and the list of feedback is long. A centimetre off the sleeve, a pleat of ease in the back, the top button five centimetres lower and the rows further apart. There's also tightness at the front of the shoulders from the shoulder pads, which needs sorting before anything else.

The quilting will be done by Caledonian Quilting in Bolton, in a diamond pattern. As on the Lawrence, the wool is sandwiched in a fine scrim so the fibres can't work their way through the cotton.

The wool wadding comes from Kofibres in Shipley, the same people who made the Lawrence's. The minimum run is 200 metres, which is a lot of wadding for one sample.

Changing colour every sample makes it hard to see what's changed and what hasn't. So we're going back to navy until the fit is dialled in, and it becomes the baseline for everything else. The red came out a centimetre shorter than the pattern, so the yarn may be knitting tighter.