Pat Albeck, a legendary designer known as the “Queen of Tea Towels,” gave the humble tea towel new life with her vibrant designs…
Pat’s first calendar tea towel was destined to serve for the year of that searingly hot summer, so perhaps the bleached dried-grass colour of the background was prescient.
Until her death, Pat was an inspired, if unconventional, gardener. Her houses sat in a froth of flowers. Her tastes changed little with the decades and she was faithful to her early passions…
In truth, Pat was not an animal person although a devoted owner of a string of five labradors. Her passion was cats. It was with the greatest difficulty that she was restrained from bringing back a succession of kittens…
Although mistress of the narrative and descriptive tea towel, Pat was first and foremost a textile designer and it was in the sphere of pure pattern that she was at her very best.
While polite guides may point out the Gainsborough and the Lawrence, the ormolu and the satinwood, it is invariably the kitchen that attracts the crowds.
‘Hardwick Hall more glass than wall’ is a jewel in the Trusts crown, transferred from the glittering coronet of the Duke of Devonshire in lieu of death duties in 1960.
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…
1989 marked the tercentenary of the ‘Glorious Revolution7. This was the phrase coined for the arrival of William of Orange as the husband of Queen Mary and King of England…
Tea towels are ephemeral, even throwaway. Their most everyday of purposes might seem to rob them of any potential dignity. Frayed and holey, hanging on the rail of the Aga or revisited in a pile of ironing…