plants everywhere | My Botanical Garden

Browsing my pictures i found some photos of old fabric prints. These ones are very special to me, as I actually printed them myself, using original antique wooden blocs from the Zucchi collection in Milan.There was one handblock for the red and another one for the blue part of this pattern. I remember holding those pear wooden blocks in hands and watching the ornamental flowers grow into pattern was like time machine travel. I felt like Austrian hand printer carefully composing pattern on fabric in his 19th century manufacture, taking care to capture the beauty of flowers in his ornament. And today, looking at these ornamental flowers on fabric i feel just the same, thrilled to know how much love for the detail, for the nature is engraved in this old pattern.

The Collection’s 12,000 designs bear witness, over a period which spans three centuries from 1785 to 1935, to a fashion that was both varied and popular. Such tastes were apparent in during one of the most energetic and fertile periods of European culture, which ended with the first stylistic experiments of the Art Nouveau and Art Deco movements.
The Zucchi Collection received First Prize, sponsored by the Guggenheim Enterprise Collection for the most outstanding cultural project developed in 1995-96 by private Italian companies. The honour was bestowed “for having saved from impending destruction a patrimony of material invaluable to Europe’s history, for having transformed the largest existing collection of silk printing blocks left in the world into a museum archive open to the public, for having conserved its own business vocation into permanent cultural wealth”. from: http://www.zucchicollection.org/pages/past_intro.php