Housewarming Napkins from Block Shop Textiles Sparked Ten Years of Devotion

Hannah Cassidy still remembers the napkins. Her best friend and event planner, who uses the Instagram handle @casanovadarling, brought a set of printed napkins to Cassidy and her now-husband when they moved into an Echo Park apartment ten years ago, and those small linens seeded what Cassidy calls a decade-long brand crush on Block Shop Textiles.

Block Shop began as a sister-led textile project rooted in India. The sisters apprenticed in block printing while abroad; one account says Lily met the Chhipa family and their printing co-op in Bagru when she was studying miniature painting in Jaipur, a moment placed by one report in 2010, while another profile describes a business launch in 2013 after partnering with a co-op Lily met in India. The company is described on its site as founded by the Los Angeles-based Stockman sisters, and a co-founder quoted in one profile said, “As artists, we’ve always been drawn to specialized art forms and their histories, from block printing to weaving.”

The work is painstaking and tactile. On the brand’s site the process is described in detail: “Designs are traced onto cross-sections of sisam wood and carved by master carvers by hand. A simple geometric block may take a day, whereas a complex set of floral blocks could take up to a month to complete.” The printers “dip the wooden printing block in a dye tray, then stamp the block on the fabric with a hard pound of the fist at the center of the block, ensuring even printing.” For complex repeats, printers build an intricate grid of thread and pins to guide registration and align blocks by eye. That on-the-ground expertise gets credited in person: Hopie told a reporter about a master printer named Mukesh, noting, “Maybe Mukesh is like, ‘Mm, I think you should switch the triangles to be going up and down instead of side to side, and this needs stripes on the top and bottom,’” and adding, “He’s a master artist, and so his eye is what makes the design as good as it is.”

The product arc has been organic: the business began with scarves that sometimes doubled as wall hangings, then expanded into robes, pillows, quilts, rugs, framed prints, curtains, upholstery fabrics and table linens — the very napkins that started Cassidy’s devotion. In Los Angeles Block Shop’s Atwater Village storefront answers to the work on the table; the shop’s pastel blue exterior sits on a charming stretch near cafés and vintage shops, and the lofted, light-filled interior was designed in-house and layered with textiles and curated home goods, an experience one writer compared to stepping into Liberty London on a more intimate scale.

Block Shop presents itself as both a small creative team and a serious partner. One profile lists the company as an eight-person operation; the brand works with textile mills, printers and weavers in India, Italy and the U.S., and it names collaborations with Design Within Reach, Heath Ceramics, Ace Hotels, Sonos, Farrow & Ball and Airbnb. The company says it invests 5 percent of profits in community initiatives in India and Los Angeles and partners with local NGOs on educational and healthcare programs. A profile noted co-founder Hopie’s prior work as a consultant at Cambridge Associates and a choice not to raise outside capital.

For housewarming gifts, those first napkins illustrate why Block Shop’s items travel well: they begin as small, hand-printed objects with a clear origin story, and they carry craft details you can point to at a dinner table. Ten years after that Echo Park move, the napkins remain a practical, tactile way to fold labor, collaboration and a 5 percent community commitment into a present that still feels like a discovery.