Pattern Design - Totley

'Totley' pattern was designed as furnishing fabrics of dobby-woven rayon, by one of Britain’s most influential designer/weavers - Marianne Straub for Helios Limited in 1947 Lancashire. This is its procedural reconstruction made in Substance 3D Designer and rendered with Blender.

Marianne was a Swiss-born designer. She arrived to the UK (Bradford) in 1932 to study power weaving and become one of Britain’s most influential designer/weavers. She developed her life-long interest in textiles during a childhood spent in a tubercular ward. Confined from the age of three to eight, with little else to occupy her, she developed an acute memory for pattern, texture and colour. At 15 she decided to study textiles and, after boarding-school in Celerina, in 1928 she entered the Zürich Kunstgewerbeschule.
It was at Bradford that Straub displayed her talent for cloth construction and visualisation of fabrics in situ. She took these skills to Gospels, Ethel Mairet's hand-weaving studio-workshop in Sussex, where she was introduced to spinning, natural dyeing and the English Arts and Crafts tradition. In return she developed fabrics for Gospels and 25 years after Mairet's death in 1952 arranged the transfer of Gospels' contents to the Crafts Study Centre, Farnham where they became a founding collection. Straub was a trustee until 1992.
In 1992 she retired to Berlingen, Switzerland, where she died in 2004 :(
Her manipulation of warp spacing and weave structures fed the mid century appetite for understated tone-and-texture fabrics. Too numerous to recount are the ships, planes, trains, collegiate and government buildings that contained her cloths; their ubiquity is epitomised by a woollen moquette designed in 1964 which was still in use in some London tubes and buses in 2000.
Cheers! :)