Strawberry Thief is William Morris's most loved design: thrushes stealing fruit from the kitchen garden at Kelmscott, first printed as a textile in 1883. Every version here is a framed fine art print of the pattern, made to order in the UK. For his other designs, browse the full William Morris collection.

Morris printed his textiles at Merton Abbey, the workshops his firm set up south of London in 1881. By then he had already spent several years teaching himself dye chemistry, running a small dye house at Queen Square in the mid-1870s rather than leaving the colours to a manufacturer. That insistence on doing the work himself, slowly and by hand, was central to how Morris & Co. operated.

It was also expensive. Morris rejected the factory methods that kept Victorian textiles cheap, and his hand processes never matched machine-printed prices. By his own account he proved a better craftsman than an economist. A pattern worked out under those conditions, Strawberry Thief among them, was never going to be cheap to make.