Our story

cloth is a small independent fabric company based in Sydney, Australia. We make furnishing fabric the old fashioned way, screen printing by hand on a long table in a tin shed in the country and have been doing it since 1995.

We love working with natural fabrics, our favourites being hemp, linen and organic cotton. We use water based, nontoxic inks and dyes and have a controllable, low impact approach to manufacturing and materials.

The inspiration for our work comes from the strength, austerity and scale of the Australian landscape.

Our people

We’ve got one boss, five staff and 2 part time dogs, Bell and Gracie.

The big, small boss, Julie Paterson, is the designer and the artist. This whole thing was her idea and she knows she couldn’t have made it without the team behind her.

Martine is the manager in general. She likes things to be on time. She is noisy, she has freckles and she says what she means. Her Mum makes great jam and is called Handy Pat.

Kate is in charge of retail and does our interior consulting. She is nice to people and is good at talking. She rarely gets flustered. Except when it’s raining and her hair goes frizzy. Mind you she seems not to mind even that these days.

Alex is our friendly faced front of house person. She sometimes whistles while she works and has a really nice wardrobe of clothes.

And here comes Hilary Knox. A first class student freshly graduated from Wellington New Zealand, Hilary is the newest member of the cloth team. Lucky for us Hilary is an obsessive list maker because she is in charge of getting things out on time. She won’t eat tomato sandwiches or take milk in her coffee but she sometimes wears such eye catching outfits and you can see her at the bus stop from miles away.

Karla is our administrative person and our financial department. She is our rock, our legend. Her grammar is impeccable, her hearing sharp.

Our process

Julie designs and prototypes her ideas in the studio just up the road from house by the beach, using her drawings and paintings of the local landscape as inspiration.

Once the ideas are ready for production, we employ local craftspeople to dye and print, sew and make.

Everything is made in Australia and sold in our shop and through selected Retailers and Interior Designers.

We sell the fabric by the metre and as a range of products.

Our materials

We like to work primarily with industrial hemp, linen, organic cotton, jute, denim and sometimes silk and wool. But hemp is the real fabric of choice. We have been using hemp consistently for over 15 years because of its unique properties and sustainable nature.

Into the mix we often add old blankets, coffee sacks and recycled fabrics to add a worn in element.

The inks and dyes we use are water based and nontoxic and the minimal manufacturing waste that is produced is disposed of responsibly.

Our production

With our production methods, we make only what we need. Our dyer dyes by the roll, our printer prints on 20 metre tables and our makers make one thing at a time. We have worked with these same craftspeople for the past 15 years and together have built strong working relationships.

We have always produced locally  because we can make in short batches, keep a close eye on the quality and have a controlled and sensitive approach to materials and manufacture. And by working with low tech, old school processes, our fabrics develop a soul that cannot be created by any fancy machines.

Our collaborations

We love working collaboratively on custom projects. Whether it’s furnishing boutique hotels or recolouring existing designs to a client’s own colour palette, we enjoy the interaction and the processes involved in getting our work out into the world.

Lately Julie has been working with a potter, a rug maker and a wallpaper manufacturer. Coming up are projects with a fashion designer, an Indigenous artist, and a bedlinen company.

Our shop

We’re a retail, trade and wholesale business. And we have a shop in Sydney where we sell our fabric, our lamps, rugs and wallpaper, our art and our expertise. We sell to stockists throughout Australia and a few overseas.

We love what we do and we are really pleased that we’ve been doing it well for the past 15 years.