Silk Scarves

Hand-blocked in runs of thirty. The one thing we reorder in the same design every year, because customers ask for them by name.

See the accessories floor

Block printing means a wooden block, cut once, inked once per colour and pressed by hand across the length of the silk. A four-colour design is four passes and four chances to be a millimetre out, which is why the registration is never perfect and why two scarves from the same run are not identical. If you want identical, this is the wrong object.

The runs are thirty because that is what one printer gets through in a week before the blocks need re-inking properly. We buy the whole run. There is no second run in the same season and there never has been.

The standing designs

The olive

Two colours, blocked on twill. In its sixth year and still the one people come in holding a photograph of.

The Solonos pattern

Taken from the tile floor of the workshop Sofia’s grandfather opened in 1957. Four colours, and the hardest of them to register.

The plain edge

No pattern at all — one colour, hand-rolled hem, and the whole of the object is the weight of the silk and the roll of the edge.

The stole in wool

Not silk and not blocked. Woven on a floor loom in Chania from Cretan wool, for the church half of a January wedding.

One new design a year

Commissioned in January, printed in June, on the floor in September. Occasionally it does not work and we sell thirty of something nobody talks about.

The seconds

Misregistered pieces from every run, sold at half, marked as seconds, and gone within a fortnight. Ask; they are not on the website.

Looking after it

Wash it, do not dry-clean it. Cool water, a drop of shampoo, no wringing, and dry it flat out of the sun. Block-printed colour will move slightly in the first wash — that is the ink, not a fault — and then stop moving forever. What genuinely destroys silk is deodorant and perfume sprayed after it is on, which does it permanently within about four wearings.