Earlier this month we took a trip to our 750 year old Italian paper mill, a very #AccidentallyWesAnderson confection of fading calamine pink offices and warehouses. 

Fabriano is a small town in the Apennine mountains and has been a centre of paper-making since 1264. For over a decade, they have been supplying us with the beautiful mould-made watercolour paper and fine envelopes synonymous with Scribble & Daub’s cards.

I first heard the name Fabriano in my previous career at Edinburgh's Ingleby Gallery. Some of our artists would use nothing else, and it is renowned as the artists’ paper of choice - even Michelangelo was a fan!

Georgia O'Keefe, Ludwig van Beethoven, Antonio Canova, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Giambattista Bodoni: their client list is a historical Who's Who.

When it came to making my own wedding invitations it was Fabriano's cards I sought out, found in one of Edinburgh’s oldest art shops, which I printed with a simple gold stamp of our initials - we were on a very tight budget and planned the whole thing in three months!

I kept the box of leftovers to scribble thank you cards to friends, the first beginnings of what Scribble & Daub was to become. If you'd like to do the same, have a browse for blank cards and materials in our Scribbling Shop.  

Something we didn't know before our visit, is that the current factory also houses production of papers for Euros and passport pages for an assortment of countries, so we were sadly not allowed to visit on security grounds - clearance would have taken weeks! Instead, we were given an extraordinary tour of Fabriano’s private museum and archive by its immensely knowledgeable (not to mention stylish) archivist and curator, Livia Faggioni, learning about the process of paper-making from start to finish, and the astonishing history of this place.

After a morning spent wandering and wondering through the archive, we were treated to a delicious lunch in a local trattoria with Guiseppe, Federica and Marco who keep modern day operations running smoothly, before an obligatory gelato and an afternoon at the town's Paper and Watermark Museum to try our hand at making our own...

A wonderfully colourful cabinet of watermark examples in the archive. 

Huge rooms filled floor to ceiling with shelves of watermark moulds.

Vast industrial spaces holding endless coiled towers of metal sheets for printing passports and currency - reminded me of walking through Richard Serra’s torqued steel sculptures at Dia Beacon.

Livia diving into the archives to show us old samples, and copies of historic correspondence between Fabriano and their famous clients.

Every letter meticulously transcribed and archived.

Delicious colours from the archives, sadly no longer in production (I did ask!)

The old factory feels like a film set.

Lunch! Fried breadcrumbs on pasta was a revelation.

Next stop, the Watermark & Paper Museum...

Terrible photo, but the paper wasn't actually too bad!