The unbeatable legacy of William Morris

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“Mrs Dalloway decided she would buy the flowers herself.” It begins so Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf’s novel, and every time I go to buy flowers to take home That first sentence resonates in my head with all the differences and years of distance that separate us. Along with the flowers I buy a gift that I owe, but it has a packaging that detracts from the content and I decide to make a package as God intended. Mrs. Dalloway would be delighted.

I open one of the drawers of my father’s old dresser that I still have and that has become that place where everything goes that does not have a specific place, and I rescue the blocks of wrapping paper that I buy whenever I can in the stores. museum gift shops. I have one with Japanese motifs, others by art deco artists and my favorite, one with designs by William Morris, British architect, designer, poet and activist and one of the main representatives of the Arts and Crafts movement. I go through the sheets of printed paper, some glossy and some in matte inks, which are so perfect that I usually feel ashamed to use them and make me want to frame them.

In 1871 Morris met Kelmscott Manor, the country house in Oxfordshire where he would spend long stays with his family until his death in 1896, fascinated by the nature that surrounded the place, in which he found much of the inspiration for his works.

The garden with a medieval style design It had a fruit orchard, a croquet field and a series of plots separated by natural fences, made by local craftsmen with tree branches. Morris did not share the Victorian taste for exotic and grandiose plants and preferred simple, more traditional shrubs such as acanthus, jasmine, honeysuckle or wild roses.

One morning, he caught some mischievous thrushes stealing strawberries from the orchard and he decided to immortalize them in one of his most memorable designs, which he reasonably titled Strawberry thief, or the strawberry thief. In the graphic pattern, thrushes with their beaks open are ready to sing (or better yet, steal an appetizing fruit), perched on an intricate network of leaves, stems and flowers.

Morris had originally intended the design to be used in curtains or to cover a wall. While it was one of his most expensive cottons, it quickly became a favorite of Morris & Co. customers. The textile printing was done with natural dyes (one of Morris’s many obsessions) through a complex indigo vat dyeing process. In this ancient artisanal method, used for centuries in Asia and which Morris mastered to perfection, the fabric is first dyed blue and then particular sections are bleached according to the design. Red will be printed on the white and the process will be repeated with the yellow to obtain the greens, purples and oranges by superposition.

The gift is special and I think it deserves, among all the designs, precisely the strawberry thief. I measure the size of the content and cut and then fold the edges as I see in a tutorial that I imitate with little talent. As a child I used to be mesmerized by saleswomen who mastered the art of wrapping gifts until the final moment in which they curled the ribbon of the bow with the edge of the scissors. This particular package will not have a curly bow, but it will have a matching fabric ribbon that accompanies the design. Goodbye strawberry thief… I go from Clarissa Dalloway to the selfishness of Dickens’s Ebenezer Scrooge and I take inventory of the sheets of paper that still remain on the block.

One can plan a trip down to the smallest details, however, the weather may have other plans. That year we arrived in London along with Storm Eunice that had decided to hit the entire United Kingdom and part of Europe. Gale-force rain and winds shake the lanterns on Kensington Court Street, twisting them like reeds, and you wonder what material they are made of. During a trip one does not want to stay locked up, observing the streets of London from the comfort of a home, no matter how pretty. And he decides to take risks and go out. The ivy vine that hangs from the balconies of a neighboring house rises like an immense green carpet with each gust of wind: it comes and goes, from the threat of flying away to returning to its place. It’s raining a lot and it’s impossible to open an umbrella without turning everything into a scene from Mary Poppins. What was going to be a 20-minute walk to the Victoria & Albert Museum of Decorative Art ends up being a trip aboard one of London’s classic red buses. After browsing the samples and before stopping by the store, a cup of tea in the living room that was commissioned from William Morris himself and that was the beginning of a long relationship between the artist and the museum, which transcended his death and perpetuated his work until today.

I choose a block of wrapping paper with your designs to have reassuring stock and two towel racks with the strawberry thief design. “Don’t have anything in your house that you don’t know is useful or believe to be beautiful,” is one of his best-known quotes. I obey. When I can.

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