My parents and my brother all have antique shops so antique fairs and house sales were an important part of my childhood. For as long as I can remember I have loved and collected fabrics, hats, buttons, buckles lace and thread - until fairly recently I had a ridiculously large collection of vintage costumes (Now I have a Citroen H-van).
What has always attracted me to vintage fabrics is the quality, the high thread count, the beautiful screen printing. When I began to make the textile range I used a lot of vintage fabrics but as the business has grown the need for continuity, the difficulty of finding mint vintage fabrics in any size and then the difficulty in actually making myself cut them up all caused problems. This led me to move mainly onto using high end furnishing fabrics - particularly linens - which have the same high printing standards without the worry about material suddenly shredding.
Today I am making up things in this beautiful Sanderson linen which has painterly parrot tulips all over it- I love bold things, figurative designs which move beyond the edge of the notebook or bag. It is beautiful to sew and is a lovely weight - good body but a bit slouchy (now this sounds like a personal ad!) so that it still looks like a fabric and not like cardboard.
