After founding internationally acclaimed woven textile design studio Dash & Miller in 2009, Juliet Bailey and Franki Brewer decided to launch The Bristol Weaving Mill in 2015, responding to a niche demand in the UK for small-batch, innovative woven fabric and products.
Although they occasionally collaborate with Dash & Miller for initial design-work, The Bristol Weaving Mill regularly handle the process from start to finish, for clients ranging from high-end fashion houses to interior retailers. This includes warping, hand-weaving, and rendering hand-loomed designs production-ready, often through CAD work.
The Bristol Weaving Mill are regularly approached by UK smallholders and rare-breed farmers who have small batches of fibre they want to work with. Often the requirements are to keep the fibre pure, working with the fleece’s natural properties to create products that both ‘show off’ the fibre and appeal to their clients’ target markets.
The Bristol Weaving Mill are involved in The Bristol Cloth Project, working with local fibre suppliers and natural dyers from the Bristol area to create a design competition for weavers and creatives from the South West. The winning designs are designated ‘Bristol Cloth’, providing ‘a wonderful example of local communities and groups coming together to create a closed-loop textile product’.