Silk · Linen · Fine cotton · Wool
Digital printing puts an image onto fabric; hand screen printing puts dye into it. The difference is visible immediately in the depth of colour and the way the cloth still moves and breathes afterwards, and it is the reason designers keep coming back to a method that is slower and more demanding in every respect. We print on a twenty-metre table, mix every colour by hand against a physical sample, steam-fix and wash, and are perfectly willing to take on a run of thirty metres.
About us
The studio began when a textile printer whose employer of eighteen years was closing bought the long table, the screens, the dye kitchen and the steamer rather than watch them go for scrap. She was joined by a colourist from the same mill, and between them they had the two skills that cannot be bought: the physical technique of pulling a consistent print across twenty metres, and the ability to look at a colour and know what has to go into a bucket to reproduce it on a given fibre.
The work is roughly divided between independent fashion designers who need a hundred metres of something nobody else has, artists and interior designers producing limited editions, and heritage projects reproducing historic patterns for restored interiors. All three want the same thing: colour that is right rather than approximately right, and a printer who will say honestly when a design will not work as drawn — too many colours for the registration, a repeat that will show a join, a fine line that will fill in on this particular silk.
We print on natural fibres almost exclusively, using acid dyes on silk and wool and reactive dyes on cellulose, because these chemistries bond into the fibre and give the depth and hand that pigment sitting on the surface cannot. It requires steaming and washing after printing, which adds two days and a great deal of equipment to the process, and it is the reason a scarf from this studio still feels like silk after it has been printed.
Advantages
Six things a hand print gives you that a digital file cannot.
Acid and reactive dyes bond chemically with silk, wool, linen and cotton, so the colour becomes part of the thread instead of a film across it. The fabric keeps its drape and its handle, the print does not crack or stiffen, the reverse shows the pattern almost as strongly as the face, and the colour survives washing and light far better. Anyone who has handled both a hand-printed and a pigment-printed scarf can tell them apart with their eyes closed.
Send a thread, a paint chip, a fragment of an old curtain or a colour reference, and our colourist mixes to it by hand, prints a strike-off on your actual fabric, steams and washes it, and sends it to you before the run begins. Every recipe is recorded by weight, so a reorder in two years matches. Screens and files cannot do this: a colour that is right on cotton is wrong on silk, and only a physical test tells you by how much.
A digital printer builds every colour from a fixed set of inks and simply cannot produce a true deep black, a dense vermilion or a strong blue at full saturation on silk. Screen printing lays down a single mixed dye at whatever strength the design needs, so the saturated colours that define a good print are available. Metallics, opaque whites over dark grounds, discharge effects and heavy textures are also possible, and they are not remotely possible digitally.
Once the screens exist, printing thirty metres costs proportionally very little more per metre than printing three hundred, which lets a small label test a design properly instead of committing to a mill's minimum order of five hundred. We keep screens in storage for repeat work, so a successful first run can be reordered quickly and at a lower price, and an unsuccessful one has not bankrupted anybody.
Designs arrive that cannot be printed as drawn: hairlines that will fill on a fine mesh, eight colours where the registration allows five, a repeat with a join that will read as a stripe down a garment, a scale that fights the fabric width. We say so at the artwork stage and suggest the smallest change that solves it, which is far cheaper than discovering it after the screens are made and thirty metres of silk are already printed.
A hand print has minute variation across a length — the trace of a person pulling a squeegee — and that is precisely what people respond to in it. It is not inconsistency: registration and colour are held to tight tolerances and anything outside them is rejected. It is the difference between a surface that looks made and one that looks output, and it is the reason these fabrics photograph the way they do.
Services
Yardage printing, scarves and finished pieces, artwork and repeat development, colour matching, historic reproduction, dyeing and courses.
Continuous lengths printed on our twenty-metre table in repeat, on silk, linen, fine cotton, wool and blends, in runs from thirty metres upward. We supply base cloth from stock or print on fabric you send, steam-fix and wash every piece, and inspect the whole length before it leaves. Screens are stored afterwards, so a repeat order needs only the dye recipes, which are kept by weight and reproduce reliably years later.
Placement-printed scarves, shawls, panels, cushion faces and wall hangings, printed as individual pieces rather than cut from repeat yardage so the design sits correctly within the finished object. Hand-rolled hems are done by a finisher we have worked with for years. Minimums are low enough for a small collection or a single commissioned piece, and we produce editions for artists with numbering and a certificate where that is wanted.
Turning a drawing, a painting or a photographed motif into a printable repeat: separating colours, setting the repeat so the join disappears, adjusting scale to the fabric width and trapping the artwork so slight registration movement does not show as a white line. Clients arrive with everything from finished digital files to a sketchbook page, and we work at whichever end is needed, always returning the finished separations to them.
Matching to a thread, a swatch, a paint reference or a colour system, mixed by hand and proofed as a printed, steamed and washed strike-off on the actual production fabric — because dye behaves differently on every fibre and only a finished test tells the truth. Recipes are recorded by weight and archived, so a client can reorder in three years and receive the same colour rather than something close to it.
Reproducing documented patterns for restored interiors, museums, theatre and film, working from a surviving fragment or an archive drawing to rebuild the repeat, identify the original colours behind decades of fading and print in a period-appropriate way. This is slow, research-heavy work usually done in conversation with a curator or conservator, and it is what the studio is proudest of, because these patterns otherwise simply cease to exist.
Piece dyeing of plain cloth to a matched colour, dip and gradient dyeing, discharge work and overprinting on coloured grounds, plus steaming and washing as a service for other printers who lack the equipment. We also run small courses in the studio for designers and students, covering screen preparation, dye chemistry and table printing, limited to six people because everyone has to be able to reach the table.
Contacts
Send the artwork or a photograph of it, the fabric you have in mind, the quantity and the colours, and we will tell you what is printable, what it will cost and how long it will take. First runs almost always begin with a strike-off, and we would rather charge for one than guess.
The studio can be visited by appointment; seeing the table and the dye kitchen answers most questions at once.