During my weekend at the Patchings Art Festival in June 2013 I managed to track down Catherine Frood who works at St Cuthberts Mill. Catherine shared her insights into how the team at St Cuthberts Mill have been creating watercolour paper since the 1700’s.
Believe it or not, every single sheet of their World renowned papers such as Bockingford, Saunders Waterford, Millford, and more recently Somerset and Bockingford papers for printmaking, inkjet, and digital fine art are all carefully crafted and finished by hand. Passed down over hundreds of years, the craftsmen and women of St Cuthberts Mill are still using traditional paper making techniques at their factory in the ancient Cathedral City of Wells in the southwest of England, and are producing what I believe is unarguably the finest watercolour paper available anywhere in the world.