Vermicelli resides in the Cole & Son archive as a block print, and it is one of those quiet workhorses decorators have used for two centuries: a continuous meandering line, fine and evenly spaced, wandering across the ground without ever resolving into a motif. The name describes it precisely.
Restored for Curio and screen-printed, it keeps the character of the original block. The line has a slight weight to it, thicker where the screen laid more pigment, and the wandering is genuinely irregular rather than a repeated squiggle, so the eye finds no rhythm to lock onto. Several colourways use a subtly shimmering metallic, which turns the line into a low shine against a matte ground; the flat colourings read as a fine texture and little more.
What it offers is a way out of the choice between a plain and a pattern. At any distance it behaves as a worked surface, closer to a hand-finished paint effect than to a printed paper, and it hangs behind pictures, mirrors and tall furniture without argument. It is a natural choice for a hall, a dining room, a library or a small bedroom, and it is one of the few papers that improves a room with a great many doors, because there is no repeat to be interrupted.
