Marion Elliot cuts her collages with embroidery scissors, never a craft knife. It's a small detail, but it tells you everything about how she works: slowly, by hand, following the line rather than slicing through it. That patience is what makes her new exhibition at Tinsmiths in Ledbury worth the drive.
Making Good, an exhibition of Elliots work now on at Tinsmiths in Ledbury, runs until 4th September. It marks two things at once. First, the launch of Mochaware, a new fabric design Elliot has created exclusively for Tinsmiths. Second, a fuller show of her papercut collages, all of them tracing the tools, gestures and rituals of British rural craft.
Readers may already know her work without quite placing it. If you spotted our 2026 Quilt Jamboree poster, that was Elliot's hand behind it, and her feature in Selvedge Issue 129, Repeat, gave a fuller sense of her practice and the paper worlds she builds.
Marion Elliot, ‘The Fairisle Knitters’
Tinsmiths was founded in Ledbury in 2004 by Phoebe Clive, built around fabrics, lighting and homeware chosen for lasting value over passing trend. It works directly with artists and makers to produce woven and printed fabrics, and its Fabric Showroom occupies a seventeenth century timber-framed building that was once, fittingly, an actual tinsmith's workshop.
Marion Elliot, The Tweed Weavers (Detail), 2025.
That history makes the Elliot pairing feel right rather than convenient. Tinsmiths has spent two decades seeking out craftsmanship with staying power, and Elliot's whole practice is an argument for exactly that: for things made slowly, by hand, and built to be used. Her papercuts already celebrate the tools and processes behind heritage crafts. Putting her name on a fabric designed for a company founded on those same principles closes the loop neatly.
Marion Elliot, Mochaware in Brick for Tinsmiths. 2026.
The fabric takes its name and palette from historic Mochaware pottery, a style that flourished in taverns and domestic kitchens in the late eighteenth century. These vessels, with their marbled, feathered patterns, were once among the most widely owned decorative pieces in Britain, found in ordinary homes rather than grand ones. Elliot has translated that same pattern and colour into cloth. Mochaware and its companion Mochaware Stripe are printed in the UK on natural half-panama cotton, sturdy enough for curtains and blinds.
Portrait of Marion Elliot. Photo: Alun Callender
Elliot's route here wasn't straight. She trained in fine art, painting and ceramics at Liverpool, took a postgraduate diploma in ceramics in London, then spent years as a writer, stylist and art director for publishers including Hachette and Hallmark, producing twenty-five books on design along the way. About a decade ago, looking to step back from commercial work, she picked up scraps of paper and began to cut.
Marion Elliot, Mochaware in Sage for Tinsmiths. 2026.
Marion Elliot, Mochaware Stripe for Tinsmiths. 2026.
What emerged draws on what critic Emmanuel Cooper called "people's art": fairground lettering, workers' guild banners, hand-painted shop signage, pargetting, tattoos. For this show, that curiosity turns to makers directly, with chair caning, tinsmithing, quilting, basket weaving and pottery all appearing in dense, textured papers she prints herself before cutting them into scene.
She still teaches one day a week on the illustration course at Hereford College of Arts. Making Good is a chance to see where the practice has landed, in paper and now, for the first time, in cloth.
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Further information:
Making Good, an exhibition of Elliots work, is on now at Tinsmiths in Ledbury and runs until 4th September.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Mochaware fabric collection by Marion Elliot for Tinsmiths
All further images as credited in captions and courtesy of Tinsmiths.