Pat was most excited to work on this design. Quarry Bank Mill is a restored eighteenth-century cotton-weaving factory in Cheshire. The design was the brainchild of Martin Sekers, and Pat had worked for his father Miki in the 1950s. An emigre from Hungary, he had established a thriving silk industry in West Cumberland and was a great supporter of young designers. So she was most excited to find herself working with a new generation and produced a group of designs to be printed on the restored mill machines. The simple flat colors are reminiscent of eighteenth-century prints.
Lacock in Wiltshire is an extraordinarily beautiful and unspoilt village – in no small part due to the custodianship of the “Trust, and before them the Talbot family; who lived at the Abbey. William Fox Talbot was a pioneer of photography and his earliest photographs were taken at Lacock.
Frequently used as a film or television set, Lacock’s houses are familiar from many a costume drama. Here they are neatly laid out in the schematic form.
A perfect Victorian dolls house frames the calendar months as windows and dor, one of the quieter designs of this long series. It is a moot point how many people actually planned their year on linen but this seemed not to adversely affect their decision to buy and to display the tea towels.
The house here is Haddo in Aberdeenshire, designed in austere Scottish style by William Adam – but really it is only the background to a group portrait of an imagined household staff Recent costume dramas have built on a long tradition of below stairs shenanigans, and in this case, it has reached the drying-up.
