This is the last of our Who's Who's for Makers Month and we have Sarah Waterhouse this time. We have admired her work for such a long time and so it is great to be able to have a chat with her.
Hello I'm Sarah Waterhouse. I'm a designer and screen
printer. I'm 33 years old and I'm from Sheffield, Yorkshire . I share my life with my husband Owen, who is
also a designer, and our rescue Pug Etty.
When I'm not working I'm knitting, sewing, reading or working in the
garden.
What do you do?
Since 2007 I've run a sustainable fabric print and design
company in Sheffield called SarahWaterhouse. We specialise in sustainably
printed fabrics for crafts, interiors and upholstery. All of our designs are created and printed
from our studio at Yorkshire Artspace in the heart of Sheffield
and we print on organic cotton, hemp and linen fabrics and print using organic
inks. Our fabrics are bold, colourful
and a little unusual.
How did you start?
I had ideas to start my own business making accessories when
I graduated from university but I could never find the right printed fabrics to
make things with so I decided to design my own. I loved lino printing at
college but had never learnt how to screen print so I taught myself using books
and picking up tips from the internet. I
started printing from home back in 2006 and then moved to my first studio at
Yorkshire Artspace in 2009. I then
decided to concentrate on my fabric designs as they were proving so popular so
I stopped making accessories and just concentrated on the fabrics. Since then
I've expanded the business, moved studio 3 times and have grown from a tiny
printing table that was less than a metre wide to an 8.5m professional print
table capable of printing fabrics by the metre.
What's Next?
We're currently working on our new base cloth project which
involves printing on a specially woven British sustainable cloth. The experience has been brilliant and we hope
to launch more British woven cloths in the future. We will launch the new fabric with new colour
ways of our Botany collection in September. We're also working with an
upholsterer to start making some custom printed bespoke furniture pieces.
What advice would you give yourself if you could go back to
the beginning?
That is it for our Who's Who's this month, but check back in next month for our usual monthly instalment.
H & Sammy
Please Note: All pictures are owned by the interviewee and so should not be copied without permission.
