Material Girl: Eleanor Pritchard Has a Way with Wool - Remodelista
Photographs via Eleanor Pritchard, unless noted. Textile designer Eleanor Pritchard is proud to be carrying on an age-old weaving tradition in the UK. She operates out of a design studio in south London and of late has started designing upholstery fabric that’s woven of Shetland wool on the Isle of Bute in Scotland. It turns out that geometric Welsh weavings in shades of gray, blue, and mustard look good just about anywhere. Photograph by Christoffer Rudquist via Dwell. Pritchard’s works out of Cockpit Arts, a converted gravel company headquarters in Deptford, in south London. Photograph by Christoffer Rudquist via Dwell. Blanket and pillow pattern samples. Pritchard’s 625 Line, a reversible blanket design woven of 100 percent pure new Scottish wool, is made in several color ways. Photograph by Christoffer Rudquist via Dwell. A vintage hank winder in Pritchard’s studio is used to turn cones of yarn into hanks or skeins. Pritchard’s Easterly blanket, a pattern she describes as “a woven study in weather mapping.” The Northerly blanket, the same pattern in gray, is available from Union Made in San Francisco for $426. Pritchard has applied her blanket patterns to a series of cushions backed with deep blue or flecked brown wool. Pritchard samples all of her designs by weaving them on a vintage George Wood dobby loom in her studio. There are a number of his looms in the country–I got mine from a lovely Latvian woman who was downsizing her studio; owning one is a bit like belonging to a classic car club,” she says. For warmer weather, Pritchard has just introduced a small collection of softer, lighter-weight blankets made of lambswool woven in Lancashire. Pritchard’s winter-weight blankets are woven in a 130 year old, family-owned mill in Carmarthenshire, Wales. Northerly and Signal cushions; £96 each Move over Eames–Pritchard has recently branched out into upholstery fabrics. They’re woven on the Isle of Bute in Scotland of a blend of 92 percent new wool and 8 percent nylon for durability.