Introducing Pemberton Editions: Oxbow
In a meeting with a retail client last year I proposed several designs, each accompanied by the trade and indicative retail price. Mistaking trade for retail, my client declared they’d take a dozen. I’m pretty fast, but if that trade price had been retail, I’d struggle to take home the Minimum Wage. Fortunately they discovered their error soon enough and settled on four, no less significant a milestone for my fledgeling business.
But I thought hard about how I could rationalise design, cutting and manufacture to produce a quilt at a much lower retail price, and came up with the concept of Pemberton Editions. I have produced this prototype edition with the means at my small-scale disposal. Still hand-made, still the dynamic design and bold colours; but fewer pieces. I aimed to get the average retail price of my machine quilts down by 70% to well below a thousand pounds.
I’m delighted to unveil the first edition of the Pemberton diffusion line: Oxbow. Each quilt is roughly 225 x 135cm – wide enough to overhang the sides of a double bed generously, and handy enough to throw over the back of an armchair or sofa. The size is carefully calculated to eliminate all fabric waste, hence the short length varies slightly between 130 and 140cm in accordance with the selvage-to-selvage width of each fabric. The patchwork design is an expansion of the pantograph I drew for machine quilting Vortex in 2023, and have used again here. The curves, evoking the ox-yoke shaped bends in a river, lend to the folkishness of patchwork a loopy, psychedelic verve.
Many thanks to those who voted in my Instagram colour poll. The first Oxbow is patchworked in the winning Mono/Red/Nile palette. It comprises four Baltic linens from a favourite supplier in Riga, a striped handloom cotton from Cloth House and a black chambray from Ray Stitch. The backs are all pale, sage-coloured, washed cotton and the binding is a striped handloom cotton from Merchant & Mills alternating with scarlet Cloth House Khadi.
A manufacturer with access to the capital and economies of scale in labour and technology to produce hundreds of these would be able to bring the price down by another 70%, but for the time being, the first six Oxbow quilts are available here at £785 including UK P&P .
The winning colour palette from my Instagram poll: Mono/Red/Nile
Oxbow and Oxbow’s mini-me – cushions coming soon!