Strawberry Thief is one of William Morris's most popular repeating designs for textiles. It takes as its subject the

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es that Morris found stealing fruit in his kitchen garden of his countryside home, Kelmscott Manor, in

Oxfordshire Oxfordshire is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in the north west of South East England. It is a mainly rural county, with its largest settlement being the city of Oxford. The county is a centre of research and development, primarily ...

. To print the pattern Morris used the painstaking indigo-discharge method he admired above all forms of printing. He first attempted to print by this method in 1875 but it was not until 1881, when he moved into his factory at Merton Abbey, near

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, that he succeeded. In May 1883 Morris wrote to his daughter, "I was a great deal at Merton last week ... anxiously superintending the first printing of the Strawberry thief, which I think we shall manage this time." Pleased with this success, he registered the design with the Patents Office. This pattern was the first design using the technique in which red (in this case alizarin dye) and yellow (weld) were added to the basic blue and white ground. The entire process would have taken days to complete and consequently, this was one of Morris & Co.'s most expensive cottons. Customers were not put off by the high price, however, and Strawberry Thief proved to be one of Morris' most commercially successful patterns. This printed cotton furnishing textile was intended to be used for curtains or draped around walls (a form of interior decoration advocated by William Morris), or for loose covers on

furniture Furniture refers to movable objects intended to support various human activities such as seating (e.g., stools, chairs, and sofas), eating (tables), storing items, eating and/or working with an item, and sleeping (e.g., beds and hammocks). Fu ...

. In 2014, video game designer

Sophia George Sophia George (born 21 February 1964, in Kingston, Jamaica) is a Jamaican singer. She is best known for her 1985 hit "Girlie Girlie", which reached number one in Jamaica, topping the RJR chart for 11 weeks, and was also a Top-10 hit in the U ...

released a game based on the Strawberry Thief pattern. She produced the game while working as the first Game Designer in Residence at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The player controls a bird flying around the screen, gradually colouring in the pattern.

References

Bibliography

* {{William Morris Textile patterns Collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum Morris & Co. Strawberries

See also

References

Bibliography