Silk printed by hand, one table at a time
Scarves, doeke and wraps out of a back room in Woodstock
See the collectionOne printer, one table, one city
The first doek we printed came off a kitchen table in a back room off Albert Road, on cotton, with a lino block cut the night before because we could not afford a screen yet. Silk came two years later, once we could stand to ruin a metre of it and start again the next morning.
Everything still goes over one table. The screens are pulled by hand, colour by colour, and a length sits between passes until the last one has dried properly, which is why a run takes days rather than hours. The hems are rolled and stitched afterwards by Nomvula, who has never once let a machine near them. Nobody has worked out how to do that part faster and we stopped looking a long time ago.
We started with the doek because that is what our mothers wore and what we already knew how to tie. The scarves came second. Same cloth, same table, same two pairs of hands.
Every colour on this page came out of one vat in Woodstock
What is on the table this month
Commissions, wholesale, and hems we restitch for nothing
We print to commission — a wedding party in one colourway, a company pattern for people who are tired of branded golf shirts, a memorial cloth for a family. The minimum is six pieces, because the screen has to be cut either way, and it runs about five weeks from the day we agree on the drawing.
Wholesale goes to eleven shops between Cape Town and Durban. Twenty-four pieces minimum, mixed however you like, terms on the trade sheet, and we will not put the same cloth in two shops on one street.
If a hem goes on something that came off this table, post it back and we restitch it. That has never cost anybody anything and it is not about to start.
