Spice up your home with… Pattern & Print

We all need a little spice in January. I’m not talking mince pies and mulled wine; we’ve had enough of those over the festive season. And I don’t mean having an affair; you don’t want that much spice. I’m talking about something to pep us up, something to bring a little oomph into the dark days of winter.

I’m not a fan of New Year’s resolutions, and I like a soaking-wet January, but I do agree that the beginning of the year is a time for looking ahead and trying new things. If you have travel and exploration on your mind, but your bank balance is still reeling from Christmas, I’ve got just the tonic – a dose of rich pattern and print will whisk you away to faraway lands without ever leaving the comfort of your sofa …

January can feel like the darkest month of the year, but we’re actually getting a couple more minutes of light each day. On 21 December, the shortest day of the year, the sun sets at 5.21 pm. After that, it grows steadily lighter, and by 10 January, it’s 5.36 pm, which is a whole 15 minutes more precious daylight! On 31 January, the sun doesn’t go down until almost 6 pm, and by then I’m in such a froth of excitement that I’ve put all my winter coats away, and I’m out shopping for bikinis. This looking forward goes the other way, of course. After the summer solstice on 21 June, I feel panicked that the days are getting shorter. I blame my grandad for my winter phobia. He used to ring me every 22 June and say in his gravest voice, “The nights are drawing in, lass.”

Hand-made patterns create a lively atmosphere and make everybody feel energised. It doesn’t mean you have to go all bohemian in your interior style, in fact, I think these kinds of prints work even better in minimalist spaces. If you have a sleek and modern home, they will add a lovely artistic dimension. You can create a sophisticated fusion between the clean aesthetic of current Portuguese interior design, and the personality and warmth brought by hand-drawn motifs from distant cultures.

Ikat is one of those patterns that invite anyone coming into your living space to travel and discover other flavours and landscapes. From the Malay-Indonesian verb mengikat, meaning to tie, Ikat is a unique process of resist-dyeing individual threads before weaving them into the fabric. In other techniques like batik, the resist is applied to the woven cloth, whereas in Ikat, the resist is applied to the yarns before they are woven. Although many designs are geometric, a characteristic of Ikat is a blurriness, and I think it’s that softness which makes it work well in so many different kinds of homes.

 

Ikat is a complex and laborious process, but you can try Kantha and Shibori at home. Kantha is one of the oldest forms of embroidery in the world and evolved from the thrift of women in Bengal. It’s a stitching method that involves layering old saris or discarded fabrics and sewing them together using a running stitch. The patchwork bedspread in the picture on the left is a lovely example of contemporary kantha textiles. Shibori is a Japanese resist-dyeing technique that dates back to the 8th century. There are lots of ways to create the effect. In arashi, the cloth is wrapped around a pole to make a pattern that looks like falling rain; in itajime, the cloth is folded accordion-style to give a geometric grid; in kumo, the cloth is bound into tiny pleats to create spiderwebs. Similar to tie-dye, it’s fun and experimental because you’re never completely in control of how the dye is going to run and the final design is often a surprise. 

Another technique that looks great on soft furnishings and gives a personality to any room is block printing. Developed in China during the T’ang dynasty, block printing is a process of applying patterns with engraved wooden stamps. It’s the earliest, simplest and slowest of all methods of textile printing and is used in countries all over the world. I managed to get my girls to put their phones down last week and try their hand at block printing on upholstery fabric. 

My younger daughter Sienna made a blind for her room (pictured), but her sister Amarisse, who is more interested in fashion than interiors, made herself a sarong instead (pictured). It was the best winter’s day ever. I was over the moon that for two whole hours, they weren’t on TikTok or in their rooms with the door shut. They were totally immersed in something creative and even though I had to twist their arms to do it, they admitted to enjoying it a little bit in the end. As I watched the sun setting that afternoon, I thought about how it can be the very darkness of winter, the hours and hours spent in the house that inspire us to experiment with new things. If it weren’t for boring old January, I wouldn’t have all this beautiful block-printed fabric with which to make cushions. So maybe January isn’t the dreariest of months after all…

Main image: BLUE PATTERNED WALLPAPER ABOVE BLUE SOFA etsy.me/3OGW0TS