George Osborne spoils all my fun

I buy a LOT of fabric and it always depresses me how much fabric costs in the UK. Although you can get some reasonably priced fabrics here, most of the fabrics I love are from America (eg Michael Miller and Alexander Henry) or Japan (Kokka, Cosmo) and they usually cost a minimum of £12 per metre whereas the same fabric in America costs around £6.50 (albeit slightly smaller as sold as a yard rather than metre). I do prefer to buy in the UK if I can as there are some gorgeous UK fabric websites now and I like to support small British businesses. There are also advantages such as the fabric arriving quickly. I do, however, also buy fabric from America sometimes because the fabric is so much cheaper over there.

The reason I don't do it more often is that I have previously been stung by high import duty and VAT charges when the fabric arrives. I don't have a problem with paying import duty and VAT but its always been very difficult to find a definitive answer as to how much it will be and how it is worked out so that I can calculate exactly how much I might save and decide whether it is worth ordering from America. I have spent hours trawling through the UK Customs & Excise website to try and find out more about Import Duty and VAT but lost the will to live was never sure whether the charges included postage costs, whether there was a limit above which you had to pay and whether there were extra postage charges as The Royal Mail always seemed to charge me an extra £8 on top of everything else!

Today all my questions were answered when I found this fantastic website called Duty Calculator. You just type in the value of the fabric you want to buy including the postage costs in the local currency and it tells you exactly how much Import Duty and VAT will be payable in the UK. YEY!! For the record its 8% Import Duty and 20% VAT. You only pay the Import Duty on orders over the value of £135 (not including post). The Royal Mail do charge an £8 handling fee. I think this is because they pay the duty for you. You pay the duty and their charge when you collect your parcel from the post office.

This has been very useful as I have been looking at American fabric websites recently because I want to make this quilt.

Source: cottoncharmquilts.typepad.com via SewScrumptious on Pinterest

I LOVE the fabrics used so much that I want similar ones for my quilt. Its Lecien Flower Sugar Range (thanks to Lynne at Lily's Quilts for the info). Some of the fabrics are available to buy in the UK but they are all around £14 per metre. Most shops unfortunately only seem to stock a few designs from the range and I need a few different ones (I want to buy 10 yards in total). I ended up searching on etsy where I found a lovely quilting shop called Whimsy Quilts and Fabrics that seemed to stock lots of Lecien fabrics in the colours I was looking for. A yard is only $10 so its much cheaper!

Using the calculator I was able to work out that the total cost of the fabric would be $117.50 (fabric + postage) = £73.78. This would incur £0 duty (under £135 limit) but £14.76 VAT. Total £88.54. Add £8 Royal Mail cost = £96.54. If we divide this by 10 the true cost of the fabric is £9.65 per yard as opposed to £14 per metre in the UK. This would save me £43.46 for the 10 yards! USA here I come! (Although I am very excited about ordering my lovely new fabric, I do love UK fabric websites and will be posting a list of the best ones I have come across very soon!)

Go and check out Duty Calculator! You appear to only get 10 free calculations before you have to sign up and pay a monthly subscription but now I know what the rates are, I can work it out for myself! There is a free app too. I'm off to see how much fabric costs from Japan!!