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We spent the late spring happily reproducing two Enid Marx patterns to coincide with an exhibition of her work which opens at Compton Verney this summer. Marx was a versatile illustrator, a printmaker, a designer of patterned papers, industrial textiles, book jackets, stamps and all sorts of ephemera. In the mid-1920s she was an apprentice to innovative textile block-printers Phyllis Barron and Dorothy Larcher.  Two of her free yet delicate hand-printed textiles are our favourite things in the upcoming exhibition, and these are what we chose to reproduce. The first is preserved only in a minute fragment of blue cloth made into the neck tie you see above.

The other design we picked out is the hand block-printed textile covering this excellent piece of furniture. (Marx named this design ‘Fairy and Stipple’, but in house we’re calling it ‘Chaise Longue’, as a pair with ‘Neck Tie’.) Hand-block printing is so much livelier than mechanical reproduction: particularly so in this case. We tried hard to retain the delightful energy and rhythm of the ever-varying connected lozenges in our paper.

The papers were printed in May and then sent off to the bookbinder and the box maker. Patterned paper and a few articles of our hand-built desk furniture are available in each pattern, only here on our website and from the Compton Verney shop, while stocks last. The Pattern of Life: Enid Marx and Modern British Design opens on Saturday, July 18th and runs until January.