22/03/2008 by conrad.

CanvasDezign recently released a mini Canvas Prints. These canvas prints are regular 6×4inch in size and are a brilliant canvas prints gift idea.

Have canvas prints on your desk at work or even give canvas prints as a special gift to your loved ones.

Give canvas prints today and make somebody smile!!

Posted in Fun Stuff | Print | No Comments »

22/03/2008 by conrad.

There have been Paper Mills in Darwen since the 1820s. This began at Darwen Old Paper Mill in around 1826 as a small-scale, family-run concern. Richard Hilton began making paper as an expansion of his bleaching business. He and his sons later diversified into making different types of paper including tissue and wallpaper lining papers in the 1830s. Papermaking required huge amounts of water and was usually supplied by local rivers and reservoirs. Darwen’s location and climate made it ideal territory for making paper, just as it was ideal for the textile industry. In the case of Darwen Old Paper Mill for example, the River Darwen and Jack’s Key Reservoir would have supplied water.

Papermaking is a fairly labour intensive process with many different processes. Associated trades sprang up in Darwen including bleaching and dyeing works and wallpaper making. There were mills in Darwen that made wallpaper, indeed there still are but the mills in Darwen also made other types of paper. Mills produced paper such as newsprint, tissue, coloured and enamel papers, linings, brown paper and wallpaper base paper. The raw materials required for papermaking were originally rags and esparto (a rough grass from Spain and North Africa needed to make fine quality paper). Today papers are mostly made from either wood pulp or synthetic pulp. Only very fine ‘hand-made’ papers are today made from rags. Collins Paper Mill in Darwen mainly produced brown paper made from rags whilst Grimshaw Bridge Paper Mill produced cap and biscuit papers. Mills then were powered mainly by water wheels and horizontal engines.

Many people were employed in the paper making industry. Hollins Paper Mill employed over 250 people. It was considered to be one of Darwen’s staple trades and even today people in Darwen are still employed to make paper and wallcoverings for the rest of the world.

However, this article is slightly out of date as there are now houses were the great wallpaper mill once stood.

The image/text was provided by Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council for use in the Cotton Town digitisation project: www.cottontown.org.

Posted in News | Print | No Comments »

22/03/2008 by conrad.

Charles and Harold Potter took over Hilton’s Paper Mills, the largest paper making works in the world, in 1844. In 1864 James Huntington, a designer for paper stainers and calico printers, joined the company at the Belgrave Mills. In 1853 Belgrave Mill was burnt out and a few years later the Hollins Paper Mill was rebuilt and enlarged. It was there that a laboratory was set up to try and make a reliable water paint.Paint manufacture commenced in August 1906 and ‘Hollins Distemper’ was transferred twice daily by horse-drawn wagon to Darwen Station. By 1910 the company was employing six men to travel the country exclusively selling paint. By now it was know as WalPaMur after the initials of ‘The Wall Paper Manufacturers’ Company. In the same year depots were set up in other parts of the country to ease the pressure on the Darwen factory and speed up distribution. In the same year too the manufacture of oil based paint commenced.

In 1929 the Company took over the paint-making plant of Arthur Sanderson & Sons in London. This was developed into a branch factory to serve the South of England. Expansion in Darwen was achieved when Peel Mill and Cobden Mill were acquired. In 1933 the Walpamur Company (Ireland) was formed in Dublin.

During World War Two Walpamur was engaged on war work producing special paints and dope for aircraft. They were asked to produce 90,000 gallons of white paint for the D-Day landings of 1944. All Allied aircraft had to be painted with white stripes. 30,000 gallons were produced in a week and transported from the factory in a fleet of US Army lorries.

This was how the Walpamur Club got its name on the Anchor Estate!!!

The image/text was provided by Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council for use in the Cotton Town digitisation project: www.cottontown.org.

Posted in News | Print | No Comments »

21/03/2008 by conrad.

William Morris was born on March 24, 1834 at Elm House, Walthamstow. His father died in 1847 and soon afterwards the family moved to Water House, Walthamstow, now the home of the William Morris Gallery. Morris was sent to school at Marlborough in 1848 and afterwards went to Exeter College, Oxford, to study Theology where he met Edward Burne-Jones who became his lifelong friend.

It was on a trip to France where Morris and Burne-Jones decided not to take the Holy Orders but to dedicate their lives to art. Morris left college in 1856 and went to work for an architect G.E Street where he met Philip Webb. Burne-Jones moved to London and studied painting under the guidance of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Morris soon abandoned architecture and began to study painting under Rossetti’s guidance. He found his talents were more suited to decorative arts than painting and experimented with stained glass, ceramics, furniture, book design, wall papers and textiles.

The Firm
In 1859 Morris married Jane Burden and a year later they moved into Red House, Bexleyheath, Kent, a house designed for Morris by architect Philip Webb. Morris and a group of friends (Rossetti, Webb, etc) started to design and produce their own furnishings for the house. This led to the formation in 1861 of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co.

The ‘firm’ as it became known, set up in rented premises in Red Lion Square and soon prospered. Most of the early work was commissions from Gothic Revival architects for supplying them with stained glass and furnishings for church buildings.

In 1865 Morris and the firm moved to 26 Queen Square, Bloomsbury. The ground floor was converted into workshops and offices whilst Morris and family lived on the first floor. It was in the scullery where Morris and Thomas Wardle first started experimenting in the revival of vegetable dyeing, starting with embroidery silks.

In 1871 Morris and Rossetti took out a joint tenancy of Kelmscott Manor by the banks of the Thames in Oxfordshire.

Morris & Co
By the middle of the 1870s the Firm had started to run into difficulties. Morris wanted to expand but the other members found it more lucrative developing solo careers also Morris thought the other members profited from his labours so in 1875 Morris decided to dissolve the Firm set up under his own control as Morris & Co.

The new company soon expanded and opened up a shop at 449, Oxford Street. Morris was now turning his attention to woven fabrics and employed a French weaver named Louis Bazin who set up a Jacquard Loom in a new hired workshop at Great Ormond Yard, near Queen Square. After initial problems were overcome the first pattern, the Willow was produced at the end of 1877.

In the autumn of 1878 Morris and family moved to Upper Mall, Hammersmith, now the headquarters of the William Morris Society. Morris renamed the house Kelmscott House which was to become his home until he died. He set up several carpet frames in the coach-house and stables and started to produce handmade carpets which became known as ‘Hammersmith’ carpets.

By 1881 the Queen Square and Great Ormond Yard workshops were becoming cramped and were not able to accommodate the new looms Morris required. He decided to look for premises large enough to manufacture all his goods under one roof. He needed a works near a river suitable for vegetable dying, workshops for cloth printing, textile and carpet weaving, tapestry making and a stained glass workshop. At the time William De Morgan was also looking for premises to manufacture tiles which were sold at Morris’s Oxford Street shop. After rejecting premises in the Cotswolds and at Crayford, Kent, Morris visited the printing works at Merton Abbey and found it exactly suited his needs. William De Morgan also found premises at Merton Abbey and set up close by.

William Morris and the Merton Abbey Works
Morris purchased the site in June 1881. He refused to pull down any of the existing buildings and apart from some minor alterations they remained unchanged until the works closed in 1940.

The site Morris acquired was established in 1752 as a calico printing works and continued to produce calicos until the 19th century. The owners of the works before Morris acquired the lease were the Welch family who produced table-cloth.

Morris adapted the buildings to suit his needs. Next to the entrance to the works was the office and caretaker’s house, next door was the drawing and design room, next door again was the dormitory for the apprentice boys. The two-storey shed to the rear of the High Street buildings contained the dye vats on the ground floor with the stained glass studio on the first floor. Outside this building was a small single-storey weaving shed. On the south bank of the River Wandle was a large shed overlooking the millpond. The ground floor housed the carpet and tapestry looms with the first floor used for fabric printing.

Before Morris could start production a number of alterations had to be undertaken to the buildings. The sheds were strengthened, trenched and puddled to keep out the damp, roofs heightened and re-tiled to fit the looms, floors re-laid and eight (6- foot cubes) dyeing vats were sunk into the original floor of one of the buildings.

Furniture, tiles, embroidery and wallpaper were made elsewhere and not at the Merton Abbey works.

The Processes

Dyeing
Fabric dyeing was undertaken in the dyehouse in large sunken vats; smaller vats were used to dye the silk and wool yarns.

All the dyes Morris used were made from natural substances based on early herbal recipes. These dyes gave a softer tone to the textiles unlike the aniline dyes which gave harsh colours and soon faded.

One of the main reasons Morris decided to move to Merton was that he found the water of the Wandle ideal for dyeing. Many of the fabrics Morris & Co produced used the indigo discharge method. First the cotton cloth is dyed to a shade of blue in one of the large indigo dye vats and then the cloth is printed with a bleaching agent to remove the blue as the patterns requires. Mordants (fixing agents) are then printed on the white parts and the cloth dyed a second time with madder and again with yellow. The three superimposed colours gives green, purple or orange. The access dye was washed away and the colours set by passing the fabrics through soap at nearly boiling point. Afterwards the fabric was laid out in the meadow to dry.

Block printing
Block-printing was undertaken on long padded tables which ran the length of the workshop. The printer would first place the printing block on the dye pad and then press the block onto the cloth. The block was pressed down with the aid of a lead weighted mallet to produce an impression. The dye pads were carried on trolleys which the printer could pull along as he worked along the length of the cloth.

After the first set of impressions was dry a second set of blocks was printed on the cloth and the process repeated. Small pins projected from the blocks so each successive impression could be aligned. The early printing blocks were carved from pearwood which were later replaced by blocks with metal inserts padded with felt to hold the dye.

Stained glass
Morris based his stained glass on the style of the later medieval period which had an emphasis on rich glowing colours in a free-flowing pattern unlike the stained glass of the 17th and 18th centuries which were literally over-precise painted reproductions of medieval stained glass.

The designs for stained glass were first drawn on small sheets which were photographically enlarged to full size as a working drawing known as a ‘cartoon’. Different coloured glass was placed over the cartoon and cut to size. The stained glass artist would then place the individual pieces on his easel and paint on the design. These would next be fired in a kiln located next to the office. After firing the painted glass was leaded together to form the overall picture. The finished design was polished with linseed oil and bran polish to give a high gloss.

Edward Burne-Jones designed most of the stained glass made by Morris & Co but after Morris’s death Dearle became responsible for the artistic direction of the company’s stained glass.

Weaving
The looms Morris & Co used at Merton were the Jacquard looms invented in 1802 by a Frenchman, Joseph Marie Jacquard and became widely used from the 1820s. The advantage of using this type of loom rather than the more traditional draw-looms was that the Jacquard loom used a series of punched cards to lift the warp threads automatically, enabling a more accurate design. The cards could also be stored which meant that patterns could be easily and accurately repeated. The draw-looms were slower and the finished designs less accurate.

Morris spent much of his time in historical research at the Victoria and Albert Museum (then the South Kensington Museum) and was much influenced by the 14th century Italian textiles as well as Middle and Far Eastern patterns. Much of Morris’s designs were based on these early examples.

Carpet weaving
The carpets made at Merton Abbey were hand-knotted or tufted and continued to be known as ‘Hammersmith Rugs’ from their place of origin. This was to distinguish them from the machine-made carpets made by outside contractors.

Morris designed almost all of the firms carpets. He would produce a scale drawing, about one eighth of the full size. The design would then be transferred on to point paper, a squared paper with each square representing a single knot of the carpet. The point paper was hung on the loom and the design copied by the weavers. The loom consisted of two rotating horizontal rollers between which hung the vertical warp threads. Two inch long weft threads were knotted around the warp threads. A each row was finished the weft was beaten down and the process repeated. As the carpet progressed the upper roller unwound enabling a new section to be woven.

Mostly girls were employed in carpet weaving as their smaller hands were better suited to the intricate work. Each weaver would produce around two inches of carpet a day.

Tapestry
The tapestries were woven on high-warp looms. The high-warp or upright loom is a type of loom used in the late medieval period by Flemish tapestry weavers.

Almost all of the tapestry figures were designed by Burne-Jones. He would draw the figures around 15 inches high. The drawings were photographically enlarged full size, mounted, and Morris and Henry Dearle would draw in the foreground and background. The finished drawing was then placed against the loom and traced onto the warp. The tapestries were woven using the plain weaving technique which had a parallel set of warp threads interwoven across the warp with the weft threads. The weft treads were then packed down with a comb to hide the warp threads. Three looms were initially set up with three people working at each loom. Each weaver would sit facing the back of the tapestry with a mirror positioned in front to reflect the design.

Wallpaper

Wallpaper was not made at the Merton Abbey factory but by an outside contractor Jeffrey & Co. The process of printing wallpaper was similar to that of printing textiles. The paper was printed with wooden printing blocks, pressed down with the aid of a foot operated weight and the process repeated.After William Morris died in 1896 the Merton factory continued production under his junior partners Frank and Robert Smith, with John Henry Dearle promoted to Art Director. Burne-Jones died two years later and the majority of the designs for wallpaper, stained glass, textiles and carpets fell to Dearle.

In 1905 Henry Marillier joined the company as managing director and the new company was named Morris & Co. Decorators Ltd. In 1925 the company was renamed as Morris & Co Art Workers Ltd. With the death of Dearle in 1932 the company lost its artistic strength, the quality of work gradually fell and with the depleting market the order books shrank. The company continued to decline until it went into liquidation in May 1940.

Posted in Wallpaper Facts | Print | 1 Comment »

19/03/2008 by conrad.

Canvas Dezign are about to launch their new canvas prints at the end of this month. Some of the newer features being offered on the canvas prints website will be :-

1. canvas prints featured designers
2. canvas prints blogs
3. canvas prints user groups
4. canvas prints stats on best selling designs and designers
5. canvas prints new preview section after upload
6. canvas prints customisable sizes and all new bespoke ordering section
7. canvas prints new shopping cart
8. canvas prints new checkout procedure, plus much more

Please visit our canvas prints website in the next month and see the changes yourself.  They are going to be awesome

Visit www.canvasdezign.co.uk for your canvas prints

Posted in News | Print | No Comments »

15/03/2008 by conrad.

Rotary Screen Engraving

In an engraving world driven by yesteryear, are the tables/times finally changing???

Rotary Screen Engraving has been around in the UK for many a century now, but there are very few people left who know about Rotary Screen Engraving.

One of the biggest problems in the decorative/Rotary Screen Engraving industry is the amount of people that shy away from change.  The biggest problem with change in the Rotary Screen Engraving industry, is that people fear it.

If you feel like a change today and want your Rotary Screen Engraving doing by a reputable UK Rotary Screen Engraving company, contact Planbseparations today.

Rotary Screen Engraving by Plan B

Posted in News | Print | No Comments »

09/03/2008 by conrad.

Wallpaper borders are a well-kept secret used by many interior decorators that I know. These simple and affordable narrow strips of wallpaper can add color and a theme to an otherwise plain-vanilla room.

Wallpaper borders are a true wallpaper product, but they differ from regular wallpaper in the manner in which they are installed and their relative size. Traditional wallpaper is hung vertically from the ceiling to the floor Wallpaper borders are hung horizontally.

Traditional rolls of wallpaper might be 21 inches wide and 20-30 feet long. A wallpaper border might be 20 or 30 feet wide but only 6 to 9 inches high. But this is perfect sizing since you want the border to dress up your wall surface in the same way as a ribbon adorns a gift box.

A wallpaper border is commonly applied to a wall surface where the wall meets the ceiling. However, I have routinely installed a border about 36 inches high off the floor. Wallpaper borders can also be used to separate two different wallpapers in a room.

For example, my basement bathroom has a tropical-themed border that separates a bamboo wallpaper from a light-colored wallpaper that has tropical plant leaves in its background. The border brings together two vastly different wallpapers making the three wallpaper products look like they were made for one another.

It is very easy to install wallpaper border material. The biggest reason, in my opinion, is that you are working with less material than a large sheet of traditional wallpaper. Furthermore, when you do have to match the pattern, you are working with a strip of paper often less than a foot tall. This makes matching a breeze.

To install a wallpaper border, you do need all of the same tools one uses for traditional wallpaper. My wallpaper toolbox has a special wallpaper razor knife I use to trim paper, a smoothing brush that flattens the border once it is applied to the wall and a broad knife that you may use to help trim the border material if the ceiling line is not consistent. You will also discover quickly that you will need a measuring tape, a stepladder, a sponge and numerous buckets of water. You might also need a 4-inch-wide paintbrush to apply a paste activator.

It helps to have a large pasting table that serves as a work platform in the event you need to apply a special adhesive or a clear paste activator gel to the back of the border.

If you want the border to stay attached to the wall for many years, you must pay very close attention to the type of adhesive you will be using. Some borders come pre-pasted from the factory, but that adhesive may not be suitable if you are installing the border on top of a vinyl-coated wallpaper. In these cases, you often must use a special adhesive that bonds borders to other wallpaper products. Be sure to follow the manufacturer’s written instructions, and use the correct adhesive for your situation.

Since you are applying your border to a painted wall, and you will probably buy a pre-pasted border material, the factory-applied glue will be fine. You can apply water to the border to activate the paste, but I have had far better luck with clear paste-activating gels. These gels are quickly brushed onto the back of the border.

Hanging borders requires the same techniques one would use to hang wallpaper. The biggest mistake often made by rookies is the failure to book the border. Booking is a process where you activate the paste and fold the border so the pasted surface folds back on itself. This process allows the border paper to relax. As the paper relaxes, it swells in size.

You want this swelling to happen on the pasting table while you are working with another piece of the border. If you activate the border paste, and then immediately try to hang the border, you will undoubtedly get all sorts of bubbles and blisters on the border as the border swells on the wall. This swelling action pushes the paper off the wall with each new bubble.

Avoid the temptation to wrap the border around inside corners where one wall meets another. The border may look good as you install it, but hours later the border may pull away from the corner as the adhesive dries. Run one piece of wallpaper border around the corner and trim it so there is just 3/16ths inch of border on the next wall. Then match up the pattern and start a new stip of border exactly in the corner. The second piece of border overlaps the small tab of border from the previous strip on the adjacent wall.

Posted in News | Print | No Comments »

05/03/2008 by conrad.

We recently completed a wall mural for a very happy customer. Steen Sorensen supplied us with his memory stick and we gave back to him his very own bespoke wall mural.

Here is what he had to say “Hallo Conrad McKee & Team!
You have done a good job on my wall mural.(Choice of border colour is perfect).

I will send you an e-mail, when it is put up (to show what it then looks like).
Yours Steen Sorensen.”

Please see pictures below of the wall murals

Posted in Customer Feedback | Print | 1 Comment »

05/03/2008 by conrad.

Metamerism is a psychophysical phenomenon commonly defined incorrectly as “two samples which match when illuminated by a particular light source and then do not match when illuminated by a different light source.”

In actuality there are several types of Metamerism, of which the first two described below are most commonly referred to and also most commonly confused:

Sample metamerism: When two color samples appear to match under a particular light source, and then do not match under a different light source this is “sample metamerism.” One can conclude that the spectral reflectance distributions of the 2 samples differ slightly, and their plotted reflectance curves cross in at least 2 regions. By illuminating them with lights with consideralby differing spectral power distributions you can witness and even exaggerate the visual differences between the 2 samples. The example below is how most remember this is the most commonly experienced form of metamerism.

Example: most people have experienced sample metamerism when putting on two socks that appeared to be black while in the bedroom (which may have incandescent lights), but later finding that one is black and the other is blue upon stepping into the kitchen (which may have fluorescent lights). The differences in the wavelength distribution between the incandescent and fluorescent lights interact with the differences in the spectral reflectance curves of the socks to make them appear the same in one light source and different in another.

Explanation: Incandescent light bulbs contain relatively little light in shorter (blue) wavelengths, and thus it would be more difficult to distinguish blue colors in such lighting conditions. The fluorescent illumination in the kitchen emits more short-wavelength light, and thus the dark blue can be more easily distinguished from black. In incandescent light, the socks are a “metameric match”; in fluorescent light, they do not match.

Illuminant metamerism: Illuminant metamerism is witnessed when you have a number of spectrally matched (exactly the same) samples, but when each is independently, yet simultaneously illuminated and viewed under lights whose spectral power distributions differ. You can perceive significant variations of the color.This phenomenon is rarely witnessed, unless you have a light box that allows you to see both lights separated by a divider, and your 2 identical samples illuminated by the different light sources.

Example: When you visit a lighting department of a major home improvement store they will have a bank of lights with dividers in between. Grab a number of identical sample swatches from the paint chip department and place one identical sample under each light. Stand back to winess how each illuminant affects the sample.

Observer metamerism: Every individual perceives color slightly differently. (Assuming the individuals posess adequate color matching aptitude.) This can be demonstrated in many ways, but suffice it to say, observer metamerism is the reason there were 31 individuals tested to derive the 1931 “standard observer” values adopted by the ISO and are still used as the basis for the majority of color science study today.

Geometric metamerism: Identical colors appear different when viewed at different angles, distances, light positions, etc. It can be argued that one reason men and women often perceive color differently is that the distance between woman’s eyes is, on average, slightly less than a man’s, and that slightly different angle of stereoscopic viewpoint also falls under the category of geometric metamerism.

Graphic arts and color reproduction considerations: In the printing industry, metamerism is the source of great frustration. It is perceived as a negative characteristic of color, and if it did not exist, color reproduction problems would be eliminated . In actuality, it is this phenomenon of metamerism that allows for mass color reproduction of an artwork.

Explanation: Artists paint with oils, pastels, crayons, and various dyes and pigments, and each medium has unique spectral reflectance curves. The majority of color reproductions utilize cyan, magenta, yellow, and black inks or colorants. In some cases printers incorporate a few additional colors to expand their gamut. But none of these inks are exact spectral matches to the media originally used to produce the original art. Therefore, a printed reproduction of an original artwork reproduction is a metameric match to the original. Inks used to create a color reproduction can be combined to simulate an artwork, but can only be made to accurately match the reproduction under only one (D50 or D65) light source. Because of metamerism it is impossible to generate a color reproduction that can match under every light source. But without the phenomenon of metamerism, mass color reproductions would not be possible and the color reproduction industry as we know it simply would not exist.

Posted in News, Fun Stuff | Print | No Comments »