Some Sam Hober silk squares - Page 6

These squares are great, I was thinking about them this week. The iGent in me thinks I should get one, it would be my first (this is my first tiiime.....)!

B -

Come down to New York some time. Carl's place is not a bad place to start the search for a shirt.

- J

B,

How does the silk quality stack up against other makes like Drakes or high end Italian brands etc?

Nice looking squares. The handwork looks really fine. I have a vintage Italian square of my father's that is eerily close in print and colorway to the paisley one on the far right in the first pic.

'Borderless' is not completely true - it's more accurate to say that David's PS don't have arbitrary color borders. Many of the Macclesfield silks have different patterns on one side than on the other, so the natural roll of the PS forms a contrasting border. That said, the Riva etarmine I mentioned above is the same on both sides, so the full glory of the fabric is only evident to the touch. But by the time she's touching your ps it's already too late...

Nice to meet you John and interesting conversation , that is a great square from Sam. I have two in white Riva cotton from Sam.

John, Ed, and I had a little party in my shop last night. I guess we should have invited a few more people.

the pocket squares from Sam are really well done.

I recently fixed some Etro squares. I was disgusted to see that they had just pinked the edges. We just added a machine baby hem as we do to our squares.

the etro prints were all digital. Not that there is a problem with that, but the older print methods were fantastic. Look at old versace prints. they may not be your thing, but the print work was fantastic.

Carl

Gentlemen, Thank you for all your kind words. I am listening very closely to the suggestions and working on some new ideas. I have one protoype of a blue silk with a dark blue border. The silk yarn was dyed and woven by hand by Noina's mother a few years ago when I first started thinking about borders for pocket squares. This piece of silk has darker corners than the border which I will take a picture of later. The weave style is a plain weave which is why the corners ended up darker. My apologies for not explaining well. The silk has been sitting in a cabinet and all the popular support for borders made me take it out today. Maybe next week we will make a few pocket squares (the piece of silk is small). The real solution for us is probably going to be some variation of Voxsartoria's "Marking Pen" idea. Except we will use a mix of fabric paint and a resist. The resist is to keep the paint from spreading. Carl and others make good points about print techniques. Hermes does a wonderful job of combining many colors to produce works of textile art. At the moment we are working on a "50 oz" paisley Macclesfield modern madder print from the David Evans archives in 6 colorways and we have a total of 6 colors for each colorway. We plan on adding to our modern madder print collection. Perhaps later we will get into 10+ color art prints. Our Macclesfield prints use the traditional hand screening, but digital printing can be beautiful. Another area that I want to work on is adding sericin back to the prints after the printing is finished. This is something that a number of Thai silk producers are curently working on and a friend reminded us today that how you extract the sericin is important so that when you reapply it it goes on smoothly. He was thinking about how some harsh chemicals are used to extract the sericin which is not a best practice as it makes it difficult to reuse the sericin. Note, that sericin is also sold to the cosmetics industry. FlaneurNYC, The Italian silk printers love to use the old macclesfield archives so your print may be the same. For those who like variety in their cotton weights we are working on some slightly heavier 120s cottons from Eygptian cotton, spun in Itay and woven in Bangkok. the samples that I saw today had a nice feeling.

This is something they want people believe but not true. Kiton use Riva, yes, but it is not for most of Kiton shirts. Kiton use also much Albini. Also Borrelli, use little Riva but much cotton of other producer. The large consumer of Riva cotton is Fray of Bologna, also Stefano Ricci and Gucci are big customer of Riva. Here is say Riva is so difficult to find so exclusive but not all true. Most producer include Riva will sell to any customer who give good order. Some limitation of product for little pretend exclusivity, maybe. Like other as Loro Piana, marketing. But I ask about Riva customer, and they sell to factory in Japan, to shirtmaker in USA, Lanvin sur mesure good customer, also much consumer who is shirt producer but not exclusive, so this contradict what some member here say is impossible find this in so many market. Some shirtmaker not advertise which cotton he use, but for one who know is easy recognize Riva. Same, this, for other luxury good, marketing so important make people believe thing which is no always true. Loro Piana sell much tissue to big campany as Jos Bank, Brook Brother, which put label of Loro Piana in suit, but also Loro Piana then have exclusive production of other tissues for England tailors. Sorry I not try be difficult just contradict you but try make little point. I just learn frase about brevity, next time I use brevity.

I have a tie in the navy, light blue, red pattern at the top.

^^Impeccable. Now those are some squares.

Bumping an old thread - anyone tried the Hober satin silk squares? Been wanting a couple of solid coloured silk squares but am just wondering how "shiny" these are. The photos on Hober's website aren't the best.