Fleur wallpaper in Rainbow takes its pattern from a magnificent early nineteenth-century Arts & Crafts crewelwork embroidery held in the Sidney Paul & Co archive. A delicate, flowing trail of stylised flowers and leaves winds across a softly textured ground, each elegant scroll rendered with the fine, raised detail of hand embroidery. In Rainbow, the trail is picked out in a joyful medley of vivid hues, giving the wildflowers and berries an exuberant, jewel-bright character quite different from the archive original.
Fleur Wallpaper in Rainbow: A Crewelwork Story
Crewelwork embroidery was one of the great decorative crafts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with wool threads worked freehand onto linen to build up scrolling stems, leaves and flowers in raised relief. It was slow, skilled work, often passed down through a household rather than taught formally, and the results were treasured as much for the hours they represented as for their beauty. Our design team returned to this particular archive piece for its unusually free, naturalistic drawing, and worked with UK printers to translate the texture of the original stitching into print, right down to the slight irregularities that give hand embroidery its character. In Rainbow, the palette embraces a lively spectrum of colour, lending the design a spirited, joyful quality quite different from the archive’s original colouring.
Please request a sample for a true colour match. Should you require any assistance selecting the right colourway, we would be delighted to help.
