Strawberry Thief Canvas Tote

The story behind Strawberry Thief is as English as a kitchen garden on a June morning. Morris had noticed thrushes raiding the strawberry beds at his beloved Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire, and in 1883 he translated this domestic observation into what would become his most celebrated textile design. The pattern shows pairs of indigo-blue thrushes caught mid-theft among a dense, jewel-like tangle of strawberry plants, acanthus leaves, and flowering stems — a world teeming with life, colour, and the quiet comedy of a bird getting away with something it shouldn't. The technical achievement was considerable. To achieve the indigo blues and rich reds that Morris demanded, he revived the medieval indigo-discharge dyeing process — a laborious technique requiring many separate printings and precise timing that most commercial manufacturers had abandoned as too costly. Morris insisted on it because it produced the depth and richness of colour that chemical dyes could not match. The finished textile, block-printed at his Merton Abbey Mills workshop, was expensive by the standards of the day. Morris was famously frustrated that his handcraft ideals remained available mainly to the wealthy class he despised, but the quality he achieved was undeniable. Today Strawberry Thief is in its second century of continuous production, still printed from designs derived from Morris's original blocks, still available from Liberty of London, still reproduced on wallpapers, cushions, ceramics, and fashion accessories worldwide. It has outlasted the historical moment that produced it, the political movement that inspired it, and virtually every trend in design since 1883. It endures because it captures something permanent: the pleasure of a summer garden, the comedy of small creatures, and the conviction that the surfaces of everyday life deserve to be beautiful.

William Morris, 1883