designandcolour@gmail.com
By Laura Newton – designandcolour@gmail.com
Zoffany ‘Farfalla’, Zimmer & Rohde ‘Cardinale’, Zoffany ‘Acantha’
Sanderson ‘Pure Ceiling’, ‘’Pure Net Ceiling’ and ‘Alencon Dusk’ Embroideries
Timeless Geometric Forms with sophisticated contemporary detail
and technique: Cole & Son ‘Watered Silk’ Wallpaper:
Osborne and Little ‘Menagerie’ and Nina Campbell ‘Coromandel’
Links:
designandcolour@gmail.com
Our Head of Fashion Design, Alice, has put together a selection of prints by Sublitex inspired by our September Celebrity Style post. Visit Sublitex.com.
By Sarah Glyn-Woods – designandcolour@gmail.com
This week we are posting some pictures of prints from Sublitex that we have spotted on the street. It is always interesting to see how people wear them
Snapped on Great Portland Street Nikita from North London, who loves prints, follows the trend to mix up contrast prints and colour.
This is Jutta; another hipster mixing prints from Alexander Henry “Beautiful Space Girls” with our famous Cartoon print.
Young Ella looks ravishing in our painterly floral and now available in black in New Look.
Cool wrapped round plaits and a bomber, let us call her Helga!
Again those funky prints just keep on going as a festive favourite. This time our graffiti print.
Sublitex can also do the smart chic as Suzanne proves. She looks stunning in her wedding outfit wearing a panel double border print.
By Sarah Glyn-Woods – designandcolour@gmail.com
Once again the week before Premiere Vision in Paris we previewed our new collection in our Leicester facility. This has become a regular bi-annual event and we thank everyone who made the effort to come along.
Having an appointment system means that clients have the privacy to review the designs at their leisure but also the chance to discuss their individual needs. Ettore Formento, the new Managing Director of the Textiles division of Sublitex, joined us, as did our Head of Fashion Design Alice Grosso.
Laura, who is based in our Leicester design studio, welcomed us all. For the event we use this bright sunny conference room. Laura develops designs, manages all UK custom work and colour for both Home Furnishing and Fashion in a large office on the ground floor.
Here Laura and Alice review the colour placement for a bulk print run in the office with Farid from Printaprint. Our Leicester facility is directly linked to our studio in Alba, Italy as well as housing an extensive library of both digital and gravure designs.
Laura reviews all digital information from clients looking at the quality, repeat, layout, etc. We can all thank Laura for spotting some absolute howlers before sampling.
She also creates and buys artwork on top of modifying repeats for placement designs. Alice oversees our Fashion Collection while Laura is on hand to tailor design requirements for the UK market.
The Leicester office is a unique environment and please contact us if you would like an appointment to discover more about how we can help you.
As you can see I cannot resist dressing up in the fabric and behaving most regally for our clients. Alannah came along and made a video of the event, so do have a peek!
Photos and video by Alannah Messett.
By Laura Newton – designandcolour@gmail.com
Designs by Sublitex, inspired by our previous post about tropical trends.
Alannah Messett – designandcolour@gmail.com
In July last year we blogged about the gorgeous botanical collection from Oasis and their collaboration with the Victoria and Albert Museum. It was a beautiful summer collection, and they have teamed up again to bring us Tales of the East.
This year, the collection is ‘inspired by the chinoiserie prints of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum’. The collection is the perfect stepping stone into English Autumn, with deep, exotic prints. At high street prices, the 25-piece collection is available for everyone, which makes it that more unique!
The Oasis design team have worked their magic once again; delving into the V&A’s archives and reworking wallpaper designs. Dresses drenched in floral prints (perfect for a September wedding), luxurious matching pyjama sets and bold bomber jackets caught our eye.
Amelia Calver, Researcher and Product Approval manager for the V&A, talked to the Oasis Blog about choosing the prints. The teams met with moodboards and ideas and, having worked together before and knowing ‘Oasis’ penchant for patterns’, prints were decided upon.
Chinoiserie is a decorative style in Western art…characterized by the use of Chinese motifs. Amelia talks about the ‘appeal of chinoiserie’ and how it draws ‘on an exotic and romantic notion of the East’. Read more here.
Click here to see the collection in action!
And shop online or find your nearest store here: Oasis Online
Pictures from oasis-stores.com
By Sarah Glyn-Woods designandcolour@gmail.com
The other week I had a flying visit to Sublitex. I thought you might like to see where it all happens.
The office block houses the commercial and administration staff. Manuela and I are grinning cheesily at you!
A beautiful smile from Claudia in the studio where designs are developed either for engraving or digital printing. Sublitex have their own fashion and home furnishing collections as well as producing many custom designs from client supplied artwork.
When an order for an engraved design is placed, the design colour standard is taken out. These are stored in enormous towers which contain hundreds of thousands of references.
Each standard is marked with the date of the first production run which creates the standard to which the colour way will always be matched to limit variation over time. The colour blocks correlate to the full and tones of the colour printed by each cylinder. These are read by a spectrometer and this information is sent to the colour kitchen.
The inks used by Sublitex are modified disperse dyes suspended in ethanol. No water is used and all unused ink is recuperated and batched. Each new print run will start by locating the nearest recuperated inks stored in the numbered drums. The colours will then be adjusted to match to the reading taken by the spectrometer.
The cylinders are again located in fully automated storage towers. There are over 16,000 cylinders in the plant. When a design is to be printed the cylinders must be taken out and queue up…..
This is a queue of cylinders waiting their turn to roll. They are on hydraulic beds in order to move them around the plant. The cylinders are solid steel cores with a copper outer layer into which the design is engraved. This is then chrome plated to protect the soft copper. Each cylinder has a cardboard sheaf for protection.
This is one of the high speed gravure printing presses, highly automated where the operator watches a bank of screens to monitor the cylinder alignment and can quality control the print run. The photograph is pretty awful as the paper was moving so so fast through the press. There was dreadful hooter noise at the end of each print run.
The MS LaRio digital machine is programmed to print predetermined colourways. Jumbo rolls of paper are let off in to the printing area. This always reminds me of an underground train. Again the paper was exiting so fast that the pictures are blurred and from here it is further dried, rolled up and boxed. Digital printing does not require cylinders nor a colour kitchen nor the time and labour involved.
Sublitex use a variety of smaller machines for producing samples which they can match either digitally or with gravure printing. The machines are profiled to work together and here you can see the digital and gravure standards being checked for the quality of the reproduction. Sublitex are the leaders in this technology and Ettore gave me a fascinating tour of the plant.
By having both the latest high speed digital and gravure capabilities Sublitex can offer clients the most comprehensive creative yet economic print solutions. I was really proud to be a member of this forward thinking team.
This is the truck that leaves every day at 10.00 and 14.00 hours taking the paper to the logistics centre M2Log. This is in another town and from here the paper is distributed to various transport companies.
I hope this gives you a flavour as to how things work at Sublitex.
designandcolour@gmail.com
The past month saw engagements, the finals at Wimbledon and the Teen Choice Awards. Pippa Middleton showed us her best summer style and is our print queen for this summer month.
The ‘Scream Queens’ actress stole the show at the Teen Choice Awards at the end of the month, in a matching top and skirt by Self Portrait.
The Teen Choice Awards were full of fun prints this year, including Sarah Hyland’s bright J. Mendel dress paired with the shoe of the summer – lace up heels in pillar-box red.
Chloë scooped the award for Choice Movie Actress: Comedy in a striped Marc Jacobs dress. The bright pink colour with the contrasting black makes this otherwise simple dress eye-catching and bold.
After announcing her engagement (with THAT ring) in July, Pippa stepped out in a series of beautifully printed dresses, showing us how to keep cool but stylish in the summer months. We love this floral dress by Danish brand Vila.
Pippa wore a colourful, geometric shift dress to Wimbledon by British designer Tabitha Webb. The bold, 60’s inspired dress made Pippa stand out of the crowd. Look out for more geometric prints by graduate students later this week.
Another day at Wimbledon, another chic dress by Tabitha Webb! Pippa really did steal the print style crown this month. This sweet, pink dress has a bright peacock feather print.
Inspired by the summery style of July’s celebrities, we bring you prints from Sublitex. Visit Sublitex.com
designandcolour@gmail.com
Once again we exhibited at the London Textile Fair in Islington this July. This is a great friendly exhibition with small focused stands. Thank-you to all our clients and end customers who came by to see us and our latest collections.
We have never seen so many people and the word from all was to expect a heavily floral print season in Spring Summer 2017.
The Print Affair 