Strawberry Thief

Strawberry Thief: the thrushes that stole his strawberries

In the kitchen garden at Kelmscott Manor, William Morris' house in Oxfordshire, thrushes slipped under the nets to steal the strawberries. The gardener wanted to wring their necks. Morris forbade it: no bird in the garden was to be touched. He drew them. Two birds, head to head, each with a strawberry in its beak, among tulips, bellflowers and curling leaves.

The pattern was printed by indigo discharge: an age-old technique in which the whole cloth is first dyed in indigo and the pattern is then bleached back out. Morris first tried it in 1875 and only mastered it years later, in his own dye works at Merton Abbey. In May 1883 he wrote to his daughter Jenny that he had spent a great deal of the previous week at Merton, 'anxiously superintending the first printing of the Strawberry thief'. It became one of the most expensive fabrics Morris & Co. sold, and at once one of the most popular.

We kept the deep indigo: a dark blue foot, and above it the birds, the strawberries and the leaves, knitted in stitch by stitch rather than printed. The colours are part of the sock itself, so they don't fade.

William Morris · 'Strawberry Thief', 1883 · cotton, indigo discharge print, Morris & Co.

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