The wonders of the wallpaper factory

It was awesome. 

Me and my friend Claire (who also has plans for a range of wallpapers) arrived at Anstey Wallpaper Company in Loughborough early Friday afternoon just in time to see the last hour of the printing machines in action before they clocked off at 2 o'clock for the weekend.

The printers were incredible and we loved watching them feed in the huge rolls of paper, gracefully winding it up and down and picking up ink from big vats along the way.

Sabrina, our friendly guide, introduced us to all the different printing methods along the way. Surface printing, flexographic, rotary, gravure, block printing, screen printing and state of the art digital to name a few.

There was a silver and red paper printing here on the gravure machine

and on the rotary machine (kind of like a screen print but the mesh is in a cylinder) they were printing this lovely palm wallpaper. 

 This is their colour chart.

When the colours are signed off they are stored in these tubes for their reference. I loved all the tubes.

and I loved all the coloured squeegees in the screen printing room.

The screen printing tables were sooooo long

and the screens were so huge!

They have expert colourists on site

 who can mix up the colour of anything that they see. 

They have created a colour wall for inspiration

and when a design is ready to print they offer up many colourways and let you choose your favourites. I'm looking forward to this bit.

After the tour we sat down with a cuppa to talk about our designs and which print method would be best to produce them. As my designs are tonal it looks like gravure is the best for me. This is where a copper plate is engraved with the design and wrapped round a metal cylinder.

All the gravure cylinders are stored in a big warehouse. It's nice to think that mine will soon my amongst them. 

Everything felt possible after this visit. It's a whole new beginning and a very exciting one. The next step is to finalise my designs. Even though I want to take LOTS to print and offer them in a myriad of colours I have to start small. I'm going to take three designs to print to start with and build from there.

Soooo I hope I can find lots of people with walls that are crying out for some peaceful nature inspired patterns because I'M MAKING SOME! :) Hannah Nunn wallpaper could be as little as ten weeks away x