Good morning and we hope you are enjoying a good start to the week! Tumbleweeds blow down Columbia Road and we miss you!

And just a reminder: you can still order on our website and have things shipped from our warehouse in Bristol.

In the meantime, we thought you might be interested in learning a little more about our coloured baskets.

We originally began selling baskets in 2006, when Tom saw some he liked in a gallery in San Miguel de Allende, in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato. They were made of polythene and galvanised  wire, in bright colours and stripes, and came in a range of shapes and sizes: wide, handled ironing baskets, lidded laundry baskets, or very modern, tapered wastepaper baskets. He’d never seen anything like them before in Mexico. Tracing them back to source, he discovered that they were made in the workshop of San Miguel’s prison.

In Mexico, basket-making has been a  prison industry for some time, undertaken by male prisoners to give give themselves a better quality of life while imprisoned, and to help support the families that they have left behind. Often, the families of incarcerated men buy the materials for the baskets, take them into the prisons, and then pick up the finished baskets to then sell back to the people who supplied the materials! (This is how Milagros acquires the somewhat more traditional, woven plastic shopping baskets (“canastas de abuelas”) in Oaxaca.) All the baskets are completely handmade, adapting the traditional techniques of split cane weaving to the more modern materials of polythene fibre and galvanised wire. To make these baskets well – with a tight, even weave and a regular shape – requires a great deal of skill. Many prisoners learn how to make baskets while in prison and find it is a useful skill to have upon their release, when their criminal record might otherwise inhibit them finding new employment. The best basket-makers are often long-term prisoners who have had time to learn the craft.

This system of prison workshops is distinct from the prison labour of the United States’ private prisons. The Mexican prison workshop system is set up to assist the incarcerated with learning new skills and having an income over the course of their sentence.

Originally, Tom was  introduced to Nivardo Rocha by the prison workshop manager. For 10 years, until Nivardo was released in 2016,  Tom worked directly with him in the prison, driving the materials in himself and picking up the finished baskets. These days this is managed on our behalf by the family-run packing/shipping business we work with in San Miguel, La Union.

Following Nivardo’s release, Milagros continued to work with him. When the orders were too large for him to handle in his workshop, he collaborated with  prison inmates to make them.  Sadly, Nivardo had a severe stroke at the beginning of this year, and died just over a month ago. Alvaro Patiño has now taken over the basket-making operation: Alvaro was Nivardo’s star apprentice in the prison and they worked together on Milagros orders for many years. Alvaro was released at the end of last year and Milagros is now helping him set up a workshop in the community where his family live.

And, in an unexpected and rather happy turn of events, our baskets caught the eye of Philippe Starck, French architect and lead designer of Mama Shelter hotels. Working with Mama Shelter , Milagros has made basket  trays for a number of their hotels, including those in Istanbul, Belgrade, Los Angeles and most recently Luxembourg (the Luxembourg hotel having just opened at the beginning of 2020 –  we wish them luck in these tough times!). Milagros has also worked for many years with Wahaca producing bespoke oval taco baskets for their restaurants (one to bear in mind when we’re all allowed out again!).

We hope you are all safe and well.

Buena Salud,

Milagros

Good morning!

Given that shops will be allowed to open as of June 15th, we’re thinking hard about how we can best open in a safe and responsible manner. Please watch this space, and our Instagram, for more information in the days to come!

Milagros sells a wide range of handmade crafts from Mexico. Although the bulk of our business is tiles, we also sell a lot of mouth-blown recycled glassware, which we’ve been commissioning since we started the business.  Of late we’ve seen a renewed spike in interest in this. We know we’ve told you about it before in a previous issue of the newsletter, but below we’ve included a little more detail about how it gets made. Plus, we’re getting a  large shipment of it in July!

Milagros works with three glass-making workshops in Tonala and Tlaquepaque, near Guadalajara – an area which has a long-standing  glass-making tradition. We’ve been working with one of the workshops for thirty years: they’ve been a part of the business from the beginning! The workshops currently range in size from about twelve  to forty staff. Within the workshops, employees operate as teams, called chairs, with a master glassblower and apprentices running pieces to and from the kiln to their working chairs. The less experienced glassblowers start on the simpler pieces and it takes years to progress up through the ranks. And, as we’ll explain, the work requires a lot of physical strength and dexterity!

To begin with, the raw materials: as we’re very proud of saying, all our glassware is made from recycled glass. For a long time, one source was reusable Coca Cola and Pepsi bottles when they reached the end of their reusable lives, but now any clear glass – bottles, windows – as long as it has the right characteristics, can be used. These are delivered as washed shards, ready to be melted down in a large crucible inside a kiln. The molten glass needs to be in the furnace for about 12 hours before it should be worked.

To start any piece, a ball of molten glass is picked up with the end of a long hollow pole, (called a pontil pole) from the crucible, accessed through a hole in the side of the furnace. For the simpler pieces (like the straight and flared tumblers or vases), the glass is blown into a tubular mould. For the ribbed glassware, a bubble is initially blown into a mould made from steel rods. A hinged iron mould is used for many of the curved and more complex pieces, though sometimes these are made freehand.

The glassblower stands on a stool and blows down the pole, creating a bubble which  expands to fill  the muold. Once the basic shape is achieved, the holding point is shifted to what will become the bottom of the piece – this is why some of our pieces have a little belly button-like bump on their base.  The glassblower is usually seated for the next stage, which involves opening out the bubble from the end that had been the blowing point, initially using pincers and then doing so by hand. All the while, the glassblower will be rolling the pole up and down the arm of the work chair. It’s like turning clay on a wheel in pottery, but working horizontally, rather than vertically and in front of you as with a wheel. They must keep the glass constantly turning because it is semi-liquid and its shape will collapse if left still. Whilst turning the pole, they will also be using a damp mat (or, in some cases, a wad of damp newspaper) around the outside of the glass to ensure a smooth finish. With bigger pieces like jugs and vases, the process is the same, but the weight – and therefore the heat – is much greater. When a workshop is full, it’s positively balletic to watch: men dance around each other constantly with molten glass on the end of thin poles!

With pieces that require joining (like the feet and stems of wine glasses or the handles of jugs), there is an added complication, in that each piece of glass must be reintroduced to the kiln so as to match its temperature to that of the glass it is to be joined with, otherwise the shrinkage of the glass  as it cools (the rate of cooling is known as the coefficient of expansion) will be different and can create invisible tension in the glass, leading to later breakages or underlying fragilities.

Coloured glass is created when a small ball of pigment (which usually arrives at the workshops in the form of thin coloured rods or bags of chips), with a coefficient of expansion matching that of the clear body, is picked up with the pontil pole before being encapsulated in a larger ball of clear glass. When blown, this expands to form a coloured skin inside the clear glass bubble. Our confetti tumblers are made when a glassblower scatters a mix of  coloured chips onto a steel-top table, and then rolls a molten clear glass object over them, so that they fuse into the body of the glass. These tumblers are made in the same workshop that creates our highly popular coloured Virgin of Guadelupe glasses – but these are made from start to finish in a mould.

Many of the techniques used in the making and decoration of this Mexican glass were first developed in the making of Venetian glass in Murano. The two-tone glassware that we sell was introduced to Mexico about 25 years ago by one of our glassmakers looking to replicate the Italian architect Carlo Scarpa’s designs for Venini.

Our glassware is available to buy on our website, but if there’s something you don’t see, feel free to drop us an e-mail or give us a call, and we can have a look for you! We are also happy to take bespoke commissions for larger orders.

Buena Salud as ever,

Milagros

Good morning all! We hope you are keeping safe and well in the time of  Coronavirus . We just wanted to  give you  an update with regards to our tiles, as stocks have been a little low for the last few months.

The good news is, our warehouse is a one-man operation – our dear Gaff works there alone and  we can continue to ship your tile orders from Bristol! The next news item is that our new shipment of tiles should arrive within a fortnight. They arrive by sea freight container, so we never know precisely when the ship will dock, but as soon as it has we can set about restocking most of the tiles which have gotten low on our website. Thank you for bearing with us during this time!
It was with a heavy heart that we recognised that we had to find a new tile-maker  last spring, as the workshop we’d been working with for over twenty-five years moved to a more mechanised process. Progress ! We have always wanted to sell genuinely handmade products at Milagros, which means handmade from start to finish. Our supplier was starting to machine extrude the clay for the tile biscuit  (the unglazed clay tile squares) rather than rolling it out by hand . This makes for a more regular tile with a more uniform finish, but it was to the loss of the wonderful irregularities that we love so much. You can tell a genuinely handmade tile by the variations in the glazed surface: some are ever so slightly convex or concave, and, when laid side by side, they make for a beautifully pillowed texture. (If ever you’re in the neighbourhood and want to see this in the wild, why not grab a coffee at Pavilion across the street from Milagros, in Columbia Road: those are our Claro Green and Puro White tiles on the walls).

S0, Tom set off a year ago to find another tile maker in Dolores Hidalgo (the traditional home of this style of handmade – Talavera – tile in Mexico). After weeks of searching and asking around he found that most tile making “fabricas” (workshops/factories), of which there are many, had moved over to the more industrial process in recent years. However, a pottery that Milagros has worked with for some years was willing, with some help, to start making handmade tiles. After a number of teething problems this is  now  the second shipment,  on a ship bound for the UK, with a third one to follow in July. And it transpires that this is now one of the only workshops making this style of genuinely handmade tiles  in Mexico! If Tom has inadvertently had a small hand in keeping this key craft tradition alive, it is also down to you and your continued support of the shop, for which we are always very grateful, but especially at this time.

If you want more information about the tile-making process, how to lay them in your home, or to watch this short film made at the old workshop, you can find it all on our website. If you have any questions before or after purchase, we are happy to speak on the phone or over e-mail. And we love to hear from past customers too, so if you would like to send us snaps of your tiles in their forever homes for our Instagram, we’d love to see them!

Buena salud,

Milagros

We mentioned in our last newsletter that we recently collaborated with Kew Gardens, providing them with recycled glassware for the gift shop of their Dave Chihuly exhibition. We thought we’d take this opportunity to elaborate, given that Chihuly is a genius in the art of glass sculpture, and has a lot of great things to say about his medium. You can find an interview with him on the occasion of the Kew exhibition here.

Chihuly arrived at glassblowing via interior design, thinking initially that he wanted to be an interior designer. When he found his true passion, he worked as a fisherman in Alaska long enough to raise money for graduate school. From there it was a tale of going from strength to strength: RISD, then a Fulbright scholarship to Murano. After fifty years as a successful artist, he can safely say: “I’ve never met a colour I didn’t like”.

In the words of the man himself, “glass is the most magical of all materials. It transmits light in a special way.” We happen to think so too, and also love glass for the fact that it can be infinitely recycled. We have been getting our glassware from the same family-run workshops in Tonala and Tlaquepaque (both in the state of Jalisco, near Guadalajara) since Milagros’s beginnings. There, glass bottles which have reached the end of their lives are melted down and made new into beautiful, brightly-coloured glassware which lets the light through just so. Every single piece is handmade and mouth-blown, which makes for charming (we think so!) variations in height or width.

Now a firmly established and beloved fixture of the London calendar, Columbia Road’s Christmas Wednesdays hark back to the Dickensian charms of Christmases past. With its row of quaint Victorian houses and newly bedazzled streetlamps, the road was seemingly made for this time of year. We hope you join us before the run is out, for an evening of characterful, independent Christmas shopping in some of the most beloved small businesses in London. The local church will be wheeling their grand piano up and down the street for carols and the scent of mulled wine will waft through the air…

Another aspect of the Christmas season is the street-wide competition for the best window display. This year we are once again lucky to have ours populated by a veritable winter wonderland of animals. These harlequin rabbits, deer, and badgers are ‘vegan taxidermy’, created by mother-daughter duo Maria Varela and Claudia Alvarez at Chulita Design. The two have worked in partnership with natural history museums in Argentina and Spain. Their pieces are made of resin, with upholstery fabric and no animal remains, yet maintain a incredible understanding of animal anatomy. Each piece is a unique and characterful piece of art. You can find their work at their website or for sale in our shop. We’ve included a short interview with Claudia and Maria below.

How did you decide to settle on an ‘harlequin’ aesthetic?

Claudia: The idea comes from our love and passion for nature and wildlife. My mother and I grew up in families where the wildlife, theatre and art were always very present.We try to show the wildlife from our human perspective by preserving the details of the animals and twisting them into something more theatrical and fun.

What are your favourite animals to design and why?

In the 80’s we lived in South Africa for a short period of time. Ever since we’ve been in love with all the antelopes!

Taxidermy is old-fashioned and associated with people who hunt for pleasure. What was your goal with making vegan taxidermy with such a playful look?

Metamorphosis means transformation, the transformation that animals experiment in their biological development. Our goal is to create a metamorphosis in people’s mindsets, and bring wildlife to their lives and homes without hurting any animals. We have managed to maintain all the morphology of real animals, but with a playful and theatrical aesthetic.

This weekend marks thirty years of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Here at Milagros, we’d like to take this opportunity to express our virulent disgust at Trump’s wall along the U.S. Mexico border. We believe an open world is a healthy one, and are well aware of the desperation that causes people to make the perilous journey to the United States, uprooting themselves from their communities and often leaving loved ones behind. One of our foremost aims as a business is to work with artists and craftspeople so as to help them make a living, so that they do not feel pushed to make this daunting decision. Mexico holds a dear place in our hearts, and we want to bring people its aesthetics and traditions. We’re always happy to answer your questions about where something is made and who by.

And in the meantime, we hope that this weekend you raise a glass to civil resistance against harmful regimes. May you help one another to live with dignity, and may the spirit that brought the Wall down live on. Salud!

We would love to see you there other than you are.

Milagros is delighted to announce that its Day of the Dead festival returns this year for its third edition. Please join us on Saturday 12pm, November 2nd, for a day of celebration. You can expect a female mariachi band, a Day of the Dead beauty parlour, delicious Mexican food, best dressed skeleton dog competition and Frida Kahlo head dress workshop – all with loads of colour, spice, and all things nice. We’ll be filling the street with flowers and there will even be a procession! Children and furry friends are, of course, guests of honour. Further details of the event can be followed on our Facebook page – or why not stop by and have a chat in person? Either way, we hope to see you there. Salud!

About the Day of the Dead

Maybe you’re someone who first became aware of the Day of the Dead because you watched James Bond strolling through Mexico City in the opening of Spectre; or maybe you’re small and you watched the movie Coco (or maybe you’re the parent of a small person who watched the movie Coco) – either way, awareness of this festival has been increasing in the UK in recent years.

Much of Mexican culture dramatizes the collision of pre- with post-Hispanic traditions, and the Day of the Dead is a great example. It springs from an indigenous attitude to life and death, which has since been combined with what many other Christians around the world would know as All Souls’ Day, November 1st (the day after Halloween). While many people are initially struck by the preponderance of skeletons in Mexican folk art and imagery, but this is actually all part of a very different, and much more positive, attitude to death. The Day of the Dead is an opportunity to remember departed loved ones, and to celebrate their lives among others who loved them. With much colour and dancing, death is made a part of life and the well-lived life is a cause for celebration. We hope to have the pleasure of your company.

If you’ve spent any time in the United States, you’ll have noticed that tequila is a much more ubiquitous drink on the other side of the pond. Sadly, we in the UK have not, until very recently, been able to partake to anywhere near the same extent, and have remained largely in the dark. Thankfully, we’re starting to catch up, and the past decade has seen a rise in tequila and its lesser-known relative, mezcal, making the journey over. If you’ve ever wondered what the difference is but were too embarrassed to ask, then Milagros has teamed up with Sin Gusano to help elucidate you! And if you’re a seasoned connoisseur, then this is an opportunity to come and sample some of the mezcals on offer.

Tequila, though more famous by virtue of its role in margaritas, is actually a subcategory of mezcal. Mezcal is made from the cooked heart, or piña, of an agave plant (pictured above). You may recognise them – they’re always a mainstay of botanic gardens. In Mexico, mezcal is traditionally served neat, with orange slices or spices on the side as an accompaniment. It’s strong, with a clean, fiery taste.

Jon Darby founded Sin Gusano, an itinerant pop-up mezcaleria, as a labour of love, to bring mezcal further afield. Jon travels throughout Mexico, to small and sometimes tiny distilleries to find mezcals which reflect the diversity and wilderness of their terroir. Many of them have never before been imported to the UK.

To celebrate Milagros’s collaboration with La Muerte Tiene Permiso (see our last newsletter) for Shoreditch Design Week, Milagros will be hosting Sin Gusano next Thursday, September 19th, between 6 and 9pm, for an evening of mezcal and beers. There will be a free mezcal for each guest halfway through the evening, when Jon will give a brief talk about the drink and Sin Gusano’s work. Join us to share Mexico’s contemporary artisanal heritage in design and drinks and view the La Muerte Tiene Permiso collection with founder Omar Ortiz Franco. We hope to see you there – salud!

Sin Gusano’s educational mezcal box sets will also be available to purchase from Milagros for the duration of Shoreditch Design Triangle (14th – 22nd September). There are two boxes to choose from: The Regional Variety and Agave Variety. Each set contains three 150ml bottles of rare agave spirits, three traditional mezcal drinking glasses from Oaxaca, and three placemats, which conveniently are also tasting notes. The regional set consists of  distillates from the Espadín agave, showcasing the terroir of different regions. The agave set contains distillates from rare and wild agave species from the Oaxaca valley, showcasing differing plant characteristics. The boxes are fully recyclable, built to order in London, and sealed with paper hand-made by artisans in Oaxaca from the fibres of the magical agave plant.

For this year’s Shoreditch Design Triangle, Milagros is delighted to feature Mexican designer and architect Omar Ortiz Franco, in the UK debut of his venture La Muerte Tiene Permiso.

Based between Europe and Mexico, the brand’s unusual name, which translates as ‘death has permission’, reflects Franco’s belief that though death comes for us all, if we can spend a life time imparting meaning and memory to the objects that surround us, it will not have been in vain. The phrase is also the title of a well-renowned short story by 20th century Mexican writer Edmundo Valadés, wherein a group of campesinos (farmers) band together to get revenge on an unfair mayor. It’s a much-cherished tale of social justice and worker solidarity – fitting for a brand that champions the work of small-scale artisans and bringing them to a discerning European clientele for a fair price.

Indeed, La Muerte Tiene Permiso has a curated range of homewares made by skilled craftspeople working in traditional techniques. Much like Tom Bloom of Milagros, Franco travels the country, building relationships with small family-run workshops and individual artisans, with particular emphasis on the areas around Oaxaca and Tonala, Jalisco. These tend to be small studios working with local materials such as clay and volcanic stone, and who prioritise environmental concerns such as water usage. The end products, informed by Franco’s twenty-first century design vision, are minimalist, geometric designs; often using single colours in matte finishes, and relying on simple curves or geometric shapes. There is handblown recycled glassware and a great variety of ceramics. Particularly noteworthy are La Muerte’s black pottery, which riffs on its lineage as a distinctly Mexican craft, but makes for eminently contemporary ceramics.

Shoreditch Design Triangle is an annual celebration of creativity and design in Shoreditch, serving as an opportunity for local businesses and institutions to showcase exciting new developments in a mutually supportive and collaborative environment. Now in its eleventh year, the Design Triangle will be running from September 14th to September 22nd. Keep an eye out for Milagros friends Mama Shelter as well – they’re new to the neighbourhood! Details of Milagros’s opening times for the duration can be found below or on the Shoreditch Design Triangle website:

14th September 201911:00 am – 7:00 pm

15th September 201911:00 am – 7:00 pm

16th September 201911:00 am – 7:00 pm

17th September 201911:00 am – 7:00 pm

18th September 201911:00 am – 7:00 pm

19th September 201911:00 am – 7:00 pm

21st September 201911:00 am – 7:00 pm

22nd September 201911:00 am – 7:00 pm

Milagros is thrilled to announce that many of their  artists and makers in Mexico work is now in the V&A Museum in collaboration with the Frida Kahlo – Making Her Self Up.  The exhibition presents an extraordinary collection of personal artefacts and clothing belonging to the iconic Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Locked away for 50 years after her death, this collection has never before been exhibited outside Mexico. It is on until 4th November 2018.

Friday Kahlo was an avant-garde surrealist and great lover of Mexican folk art and traditions. Yet careful attention to her mother country’s exceptional folk art traditions shows that surrealism is practically imbued in its culture, with angels, devils, skeletons and virgins living comfortably alongside the vernacular of a modern capitalist society. Never having undergone a protestant reformation nor a proletarian revolution, Mexico remains deeply enmeshed in a religious and agrarian imaginary from which it looks slightly askance at the break-neck speed of Western technological society. No matter how fast your internet speed or big your picture hat, underneath we are all skeletons! It is Milagros’s great pleasure to make the connections between Kahlo’s work and the folk art she celebrated more vivid to the V&A’s visitors.

Milagros – Where the Living and the Dead Go Shopping

Tom Bloom set up Milagros in 1991, importing Mexican folk art, glassware, tiles and ceramics to sell in his Queens Road café in Bristol. The business venture was inspired by his visit to Mexico the previous year when he fell in love with the flamboyant, eclectic beauty of its folk art and crafts. A shop would give visibility to these little known delights as well as help sustain the fragile network of makers he met on his travels. Tom met the textile designer Juliette Tuke in 1997 and they entered partnership together. That year the business moved to Columbia Rd, home to the colourful and rowdy East End flower market. A more complimentary setting you couldn’t find. The shop’s name, Milagros, means ‘miracle’ in Spanish and conjures the proximity of the Gods in daily Mexican life. But this toe-hold of Mexico on the streets of rainy London, filled with grimacing skulls, iridescent glazes, winking patterns and exotic carved chimeras can feel like a miracle of its own to the casual passer by.