We love to support British designers where we can, so this week we have a real treat for you. Set up in 2004 by Peter Thwaites and Rebecca Aird, Rapture & Wright showcases their brimming portfolio of patterns, designed over the years, into a collection of fabrics and wallpapers. Confident that they could save the dwindling British textile industry by themselves, they built a hand printing table in a leaky barn and sought out the best suppliers across the British Isles.
At the heart of the business is the workshop, one of the few remaining handprint studios in the UK. This is where ideas become designs and those designs become fabrics and wallpapers.
Small scale, artisan production is time-consuming and physically demanding but the results are personal and subtly different, reflecting the hand of the maker. Far from being trapped by tradition, Rapture & Wright adapt age-old techniques in clever ways to make fabrics and wallpapers for contemporary and classical tastes alike.
As all of their fabrics are hand printed we thought you would be interested to see their process from mixing the inks, rolling out the unprinted base cloth and setting the pattern repeat precisely so that each section of the design will match up when printed. Once one colour has gone down on to the fabric the screen is washed and prepared for subsequent colours. As you can imagine, this is a time-consuming process and 30m can take two people up to a day to print.
We stock Rapture & Wright in the studio and whilst we do not have their entire collection we can get samples in all colourways. If you have liked what you have seen then why not pop in to the studio to see the designs we have, or look at one of the many other British designers we support. We look forward to welcoming you soon.
