[4] Until 1910 they lived in Broad Campden[4] where the arts and crafts architect Charles Robert Ashbee had established a community of artists and craftspeople.

This Guild and School of Handicraft in Chipping Campden included Ethel's brother Frederick James Partridge,[6] a jeweller.

[4] Aside from some rudimentary lessons in Ceylon and the British Isles, Ethel Mairet was self-taught as a weaver, spinner and dyer.

She wrote to the Ashbees over this period, and kept a journal detailing her discoveries of rare textiles and decorative jewellery, noting the vegetable dyes used.

The following year she was visited by Mahatma Gandhi, who knew of her work in Ceylon and was interested in using simple textile techniques in India (see Khadi).

[2] In 1916 she published A Book on Vegetable Dyes[5] printed by Hilary Pepler at the Hampshire House Press in Hammersmith, London.

[4] In 1917 she completed An Essay on Crafts and Obedience and oversaw the production of the second edition of A Book on Vegetable Dyes, both published by Pepler at St Dominic's Press in Ditchling.

Mairet's training is said to have influenced all the handweavers of that generation, including Hilary Bourne, Valentine KilBride, Elizabeth Peacock, Petra Gill and Peter Collingwood.

[10] A surviving journal written by Mairet from a European journey with her husband in 1927 illustrates how her observations were dominated not by whom she met but what they were wearing.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography quotes the Japanese potter Shoji Hamada who called Mairet "the mother of English hand-weaving".