Stead McAlpin Fabrics UK. – Fine English Fabric Printers since 1835.

Stead McAlpin has been manufacturing high-quality furnishing fabrics since 1835.

As specialist printers and dyers, we operate mainly from designs commissioned by our customers, producing both apparel and furnishing fabrics to the highest standards.

Always striving to move ahead, we keep abreast of the latest technology and continually search for ways to improve our operational techniques. We offer screen printing for runs as short as 100 metres, with widths up to 3.2 metres and up to 25 colours. While our digital printing facility promises immense versatility, we also continue to provide a full range of facilities from design interpretation, colour separation and screen engraving through to fabric preparation, printing and a range of specialist finishes. Finished goods are warehoused and ultimately despatched in line with our customers’ requirements.

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Printing

Our modern, highly flexible printing operation enables us to offer our customers rotary screen, flat screen and digital printing.

Extra wide up to 3.2 meters prints
We can print as little as 10 meters
Rotary, flat, and digital machines

Type of Printing

Rotary is conventional way of printing using rolled nickel screens, and can allow up to 24 colours.
Flat-screen or flatbed is another convenient way of printing that uses silk mesh screens, up to 25 colours.
Our digital printing capability allows customers to print short runs directly to fabric without the expense of producing screens and without colour restrictions.

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Dyeing

Using our piece dyeing service, customers are able to create a ground shade for printing, or dye solid shades or cross-dye.

Types of Dyeing

We can dye to match any shade using the expertise of our colour chemists
We have pigment, reactive, VAT and high temperature disperse dyeing for man-made fibres.
We also have the ability to cross dye in our soft flow air jet machines.

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Finishing

Using our expertise and state of the art equipment, we are able to apply various types of finishes to meet your requirements.

Expertise

We also offer a number of finishes, including: Calendering, Schreinering, Chintzing, Compressive shrinking, Emerising, Airo-tumble finishing, Open width tumbling, and Chemical finishes including specialty coating and flame retardant finish.

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Design

The design studio is made up of a team of talented artists who all have a wealth of experience in the industry.

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If required we offer an in-house design service that can simply make designs print-ready from your existing images, or we can produce a new design from an initial idea to one that is fully repeated and separated.

Our highly professional, the customer-focused team prides itself on quality and accuracy, producing designs of the highest standards.

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Base Cloths

We have a wide range of over 50 ground cloths in stock onsite, and can source others if required from suppliers.

Materials

Linens, Linen unions, Cotton, Satins, Velvets, Silks, Duck, Trevira CS, Dobbies, and Jacquards.

We have a variety of weights of cloths suitable for apparel, interiors, upholstery, and outdoors; as well as numerous shade and blind fabrics.

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The Stead McAlpin Archive: Memories From Our History

Our customers have access to over 25,000 designs in the design archive, dating from the end of the 18th Century to the 20th Century.

This amazing archive encompasses a wide range of design styles and contains work by famous designers from the 19th and 20th centuries.

Our customers have exclusive use of their selected designs and may reproduce them as they are, or adapt them as they wish.

A WALK THROUGH OUR ARCHIVE IS LIKE WALKING THROUGH THE HISTORY OF FABRIC PRINTING.

Over our vast history, we have printed for Queen Victoria, Queen Elizabeth II, Buckingham Palace, and other Royals, as well as Winston Churchill, and the Titanic. We are also proud to print for many famous designers, including Lucienne Day, William Morris, and Harry Wearne to name a few.

We won medals at both the Society of Arts and the International Fair in 1862.

The Victoria and Albert Chintz was chosen by Queen Victoria to furnish the Royal Yacht in 1852.

Queen Victoria was a keen artist and secretly incorporated a portrait of herself and Prince Albert into the Victoria and Albert chintz. Their side profiles were very cleverly placed to look like tendrils in amongst the florals. Can you spot the silhouettes?

The first recorded order for Queen Elizabeth was while she was still a Princess. A wedding present from the Cotton Industry, with the C in the design number dating the design between 1790 and 1894

Whilst giving an interview, the Queen was spotted sitting on a Thistle design dating to 1897. This interview was recorded at Balmoral, where, according to the Aberdeen Journal from 1855, one of the bedrooms is decorated with curtains of the Victoria and Albert chintz.

From 1952-1954 the SS Gothic was designated a Royal Yacht for the Queens tour of Australia.
This 12-colour copper roller printed fabric was used for the furnishings in the
Stateroom on the Gothic.

Hyde Park was especially designed for Prince Charles’s nursery in 1949 and was used in Clarence House.

J.K. Rowling sat on this chair whilst writing the Harry Potter series of books, she donated it to a charity and it was originally sold for £50,000 in 2002.

The new owner re-sold the chair in 2006 for £300,000!

The fabric on the chair is a Nina Campbell design printed at Stead McAlpin.

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