About

Perren Studios is a design practice centred around creativity, play and exploration. Making, drawing, designing and teaching form the foundations of this studio through the medium of textiles.

As the owner of the Studio, Nicola Perren plays with scale, colour, form and mark-making to make hand painted and digital prints onto sustainably sourced plant-based fabric, ready for the user to translate into quilts, fashion, accessories, soft furnishings and so on. Nicola pays particular attention to hand painting fabrics suitable for zero-waste pattern cutting and utilising small fabric pieces for applique as mending or decoration.

Quilts hold a particular fascination for Nicola, specifically Whole Cloth quilts, which can be found around the world in many communities, of particular note are those known as Durham Quilts and those made in Wales. Rather than patch-working multiple fabrics together to create a larger and new block of fabric, whole cloth uses just one large piece of cloth and the decorative element comes from the stitching used in the quilting phase. These quilts can then be machine or hand stitched as well as hand knotted, the versatility and accessibility of such quilts is what draws Nicola to them.

With an interest in large scale drawing, whole cloth quilts provide a direction for their work while offering a modern take on a heritage technique.