The September diary is an easy one: it was new collection launch month and the culmination of everything that the team and I have worked towards over the previous twelve months.
We launch one collection a year, usually in early September. Work for the launch starts in late Autumn of the previous year when I will start to pull together documents and ideas that will go on to form the new collection. We work on the artwork - creating the individual designs, colours, scale - working backwards and forwards with our fabric printers who send us sample prints, known as 'strike offs', until about February when we should be homing in on the final approved designs and colourways.
With luck and a fair wind, we usually hope to press the button on the launch print in February - a first print run of meterage of each design in every colourway for the launch. But it isn't an exact science by any means and that was borne out this year. We had been working in a completely different direction for this collection but just couldn't make it sing. I knew where I wanted to get to with the original ideas but it just wasn't coming together. At the eleventh hour I realised that we had to go back to the drawing board. In February - yes, February, when we should have been far into the process - I decided to start again. I pulled two documents from my design archive: a pretty French blockprint and an antique cotton dye-resist handkerchief, probably dating from the 1800s.
Seeing where the documents can go in design terms is, I think, the skill. In the same way that some people can walk into a derelict house and know exactly what it could look like, l can look at old textiles and see pretty immediately what we can create from them and how we need to adapt them to bring them into the collection. I'm not sure if it's a skill that can be learned but it's certainly one that can be honed and I have improved over the years. Knowing that I will be able to create a new collection is not a part of the process that tends to have me awake at night.
And so from the two archive pieces came the hero print of the collection, Labeaume Linen; a coordinator, Labeaume Posy Linen; and the prettiest ditsy print, Daisy. We love Daisy so much that we have released it in the inverse too, and both in six colours which has made for a rather larger collection than we had planned, but we couldn't resist! And then there's a heavenly Daisy wallpaper and two braids, each in seven - SEVEN! - colours. The collection is named Labeaume, in keeping with my habit of naming for villages in the Ardèche in France, an area loved and visited for many years.
My design process has changed over the years - I now design a collection with a particular room in mind. This year it was our daughter Ellie's bedroom in the attic at Inchyra.
I create a 'hero' print - something that a whole room scheme can develop from, usually on a larger scale, and then work up coordinating designs from there. What we end up with at Inchyra is a room decorated for the collection launch shoot that is saturated in the new collection - not necessarily a way that other people will use the designs - but if it works well at this stage then we can be pretty confident we've got it right. Labeaume certainly worked! And it was really wonderful to have welcomed photographer Abbie Melle back to Inchyra to shoot for the launch. We met last year when Abbie visited Inchyra to shoot for Jenny Rose Innes's new book, The Nature of Decorating, and I absolutely fell in love with Abbie's style which felt so right for Inchyra. The results of the shoot were incredible.
You can explore the new collection on our website here - I'd love to hear your feedback so do drop me a comment below.
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IN THE PRESS
The magazines, meanwhile, had been busy on our behalf. The October issues land at the very start of September, timed to the new collections, and this year The World of Interiors put our Daisy linen on about six pages of the most incredible new collections styled shoot I think I have ever seen. Style Director Ruth Sleightholme worked with the Little Angel Theatre Company to produce a puppet theatre performance of Aschenputtel, the German version of Cinderella, featuring fabrics and wallpapers from this year's new collections. Within 27 exquisite pages, Daisy appears as miniature shirts on puppets and tiny leaves on the trees. What a joy to have been a little part of this! And then, joyfully, the show was filmed for our further enjoyment! You can see it below.
And The English Home magazine published an entire page announcing the collection! Incredibly gratifying.
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Then it was down London for FOCUS, the Autumn design week centred on Chelsea Harbour. The LineUp showroom was incredibly busy, with a steady tide of people through the door all week. Highlights of the FOCUS stands for me were the Floren lighting stand and the Studio Ham 'shop'. Lovely along the way to bump into Sean Symington and to meet Richard Smith of Madeaux - our paths have so nearly crossed so many times so great to finally be in the same place at the same time. Selfie queen!
A lovely moment in the scheming in the LineUp showroom resulted in the pretty combination below. It's always wonderful to see how our new designs and colourways so often fit seamlessly with existing designs in the collection and here we have Dianthus Linen, in the collection since 2019, alongside our new Daisy wallpaper, wide-width Jaujac Braid released last year, and two of this year's Labeaume Gimps in Teal and Mustard.
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FINISHED OFF
I headed down to Yorkshire on a regular visit to our finishing mill. Much like most people who are involved in producing a textile line, there is nothing I like more than spending time on the manufacturing side and a visit to this mill is always fascinating. Mountains of unfinished fabric wends their way on huge wheeled trolleys around this massive building, as it goes through process after process, until a beautiful fabric appears at the other end. From loomstate to finished fabric always feels to me like caterpillar to butterfly.
Here's a peek at a tiny part of the inside of this massive space - the footprint can be measured in acres - including a trolley of Inchyra linens on their way through processing.
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I wrote the last of this month's Diary in Ljubljana, where I'd gone for what should have been a long weekend of hill walking. Annoyingly what began as a twinge in my hip when I started training for the trip in May has turned out to be rather more serious than I'd hoped, so the walking didn't happen and an operation will. Very kindly, the walking friends insisted I still join them and so the exercise gave way to rest with a lot of laughing and good food thrown in.
Slovenia is beautiful. I have never bee nto anywhere so clean and tidy. No rubbish, immaculate houses - seemingly all of them freshly painted - no fly tipping anywhere I could see. Very impressive. And the bluest of blue lakes.
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What an incredible month we've had: the reception to the new collection has honestly been more than we could have anticipated. We have motored through the samples made for launch - far quicker than any previous collection - and we are already printing fabrics and wallpapers for clients which is amazingly quick.
The team always open a book on which is going to be the first thing ordered from a collection and the winner for the Labeaume Collection was ... the Labeaume Gimp in Apple!
Can't believe it's October already - where has the year gone? - time to start thinking about the next collection!
Much love
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