Article: Strawberry Thief: William Morris in the Lowcountry
Strawberry Thief: William Morris in the Lowcountry
The napkins come out of the drawer folded from last Christmas. Liberty of London's famous Strawberry Thief pattern — thrushes and berries on indigo, worn soft enough now to drape. I set a stack by the bar before anything else goes down, because that's where they'll actually get used.
By seven the room is full and the Strawberry Thief cocktail napkins are doing their work: folded around cold glasses, tucked under plates. Somebody's thumb finds the scalloped edge while she's talking and stays there, worrying the raised stitching without looking down. Someone else turns one over to see the birds right way up. Nobody comments. But the napkins are being handled, and handling is a kind of noticing.
Which is the part Morris would have cared about.
William Morris designed his Strawberry Thief pattern in 1883, and named it after the thrushes that kept raiding the strawberry beds in his kitchen garden at Kelmscott Manor, on the upper Thames. It isn't a motif borrowed from a pattern book. The pattern depicts his garden, his little "thieves".
It also took him six years to work out how to print it.
He wanted it done by indigo discharge: dye the cloth blue, bleach the pattern back out, then build the other colors in by hand, block by block. A single bolt of fabric took days.
Chemical dyes had been on the market for a generation — faster, cheaper, brighter — and he wanted nothing to do with them. He wasn't being precious. He had concluded that the cheap way produced cheap things, and that this was the level of care required as a mark of craftsmanship.
His argument went well past cloth.
The factory Morris worried about was down the road from him. The man inside it repeated one operation all day and had no say in anything that came off the line — and Morris thought you could feel it: his connection to what he was making had been hollowed out, and the thing he was making emptied with it.
Today, globalization has only made this problem worse, and I walked into this realization one afternoon without warning.
Years ago, before our store existed, Deborah and I were shopping for a hostess gift. I picked up an oyster plate, turned it over, and found the stamp on the back: Made in China. Something in me recoiled before I had a reason for it. I grew up here, at the edge of the Lowcountry, where oysters aren't food so much as a ritual — gathered on porches and back docks, passed by hand, harvested from the saltwater creeks surrounding us. An oyster plate isn't just a dish. And here it was, competent, glazed, correct, but made three thousand miles from its natural "habitat".
It felt like finding a family photograph taken by someone who'd never met the family. We put it down and left without it. And presenting it as a special gift to my sister just didn't feel...special.
The reasons came later, on the drive home and for a long while after that. What does a potter on the other side of the world understand about eating oysters here? Not the shape — you can photograph a shape. But how about the wells sized to the oysters we actually pull out of the local waters. How many people stand around a table. What's in your other hand. A form can be copied. The knowledge of the meal cannot.
That question is the reason Southern Crafted exists. What I can't claim is that asking that question was originally my idea.
A decade before that afternoon, while I still had a job in technology, I spent two years apprenticed to the furniture maker Gary Rogowski in Portland, Oregon, learning everything from furniture design to cutting joinery. The reading came with the bench — including the writings of William Morris on the difference between craftsmanship and mass production.
What I had not done was feel it until then, and it took an oyster plate to close the loop for me.
So we decided to open the store we wished we'd walked into that afternoon. We had little luck finding things to sell at the wholesale markets like ADAC or High Point... where they furnish the same imported goods to every shop in every town. Instead, we reached out to craftspeople who had no particular reason to answer our letters.
The first potter who said yes was Melissa Bridgman, in Memphis. She made ceramic oyster plates, formed and glazed and painted one at a time, no two of them the same.
What convinced me was on the back.
Every one of her plates has a hook worked into it, so that when the oysters are gone the plate goes up on the wall instead of into a cupboard. Nobody asks a potter for that. You only think of it if you have been in the houses where these plates live — if you know they come down for the roast and go back up over the sideboard, and that a plate around here is half serving piece and half something you look at the rest of the year.
The hook isn't a feature. It's evidence.
Southern craftsmanship, the way we mean it, isn't a region stamped on the underside of an object. It's a maker fluent enough in the life of a thing to get the small decisions right — the ones nobody specified, and nobody notices, until the object is in use.
The oyster knife beside the plate came from Join or Die, and the handle was cut from a live oak that stood three hundred years in Savannah's McCauley Park before it came down, a few miles from where the oysters were pulled. Neither object announces itself. Both were made by people who have eaten the meal.
The party thins out around eleven. The napkins come back to the kitchen in a pile, damp at the corners, one of them wearing a thumbprint of cocktail sauce that will wash out. The plate gets rinsed the next morning and, once dry, goes back on its hook above the sideboard, where it hangs until the next roast.
That hook is the whole difference. The oyster plate we didn't buy had nowhere to go when the meal was over, because the person who made it had never seen a wall it might hang on.
Everything we have done since has been a matter of finding the people who have.
Who designed the Strawberry Thief pattern?
William Morris designed Strawberry Thief in 1883. The pattern came from the thrushes that stole fruit from the strawberry beds in his kitchen garden at Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire. It remains one of the most recognizable designs of the Arts and Crafts movement and is still printed by Liberty of London today.
What is indigo discharge printing?
Indigo discharge printing dyes the whole cloth blue, bleaches the pattern back out of it, then builds the remaining colors in by hand, block by block. Morris first attempted the method in 1875 and did not succeed until 1883, after moving to his own works at Merton Abbey. Strawberry Thief was the first design in which he managed to lay red and yellow into the blue and white ground. A single length took days to produce.
Why was Strawberry Thief so expensive when it first released in 1881?
It was among the most costly printed cottons Morris & Co. ever sold, because indigo discharge printing is slow and done by hand. Morris refused the chemical dyes that had been available for a generation, having concluded that cheaper production made worse objects. The pattern became one of the firm's best sellers anyway.
What makes a handmade oyster plate different from a mass-produced one?
A form can be copied; the knowledge of how a thing is used cannot. Melissa Bridgman's oyster plates, made by hand in Memphis, are finished with a hook worked into the back so the plate can hang on a wall between meals — a detail that only occurs to a maker who has been in the houses where these plates live. That fluency in the life of an object, rather than the region stamped on its underside, is what Southern Crafted means by craftsmanship.
Ashley McCorkle
Ashley McCorkle is a founder of Southern Crafted. He comes from a product design background and writes about consumer trends and design.
