A workshop, not a factory.

How it started

Eleri Vaughan trained in a traditional workshop in Bristol in the late nineties, at a bench next to a man who had been doing it since the war and did not believe in staples. She spent eight years restoring for antique dealers, then came home to the valleys and opened Thread & Frame in a single unit with a second-hand sewing machine and a van with a dodgy clutch.

Seventeen years on there are three of us, two units knocked through, and the van has been replaced twice. The method has not changed. Every piece comes back to the frame. Traditional pieces get traditional materials: tacks, twine, hessian, horsehair, hand-stitched edges. Modern pieces get modern foams and fibres where they belong. Nothing gets a new cover stretched over old padding, because that is how you end up doing the job twice.

What we believe

That a well-made frame deserves a second and third life. That the fabric is the last ten percent of the job and the padding is the other ninety. That you should see photographs of what was under your old cover, because it is your chair. And that if a piece is not worth doing, the honest thing is to say so before we take your money, which we do, more often than you would think.