Craftsman Style with Remnants

My DH is a woodworker and a maker of Craftsman-style furniture. His most recent accomplishment is this “grandfather chair” and ottoman in the style of Gustav Stickley.

Stickley-style Grandfather Chair

He has also made a settee, a Morris Chair, a media console, and several tables. As the rooms are graced with more pieces of Arts and Crafts style furniture he has lovingly produced, we’ve thought about adding accessories like lighting, textiles, art objects and even wall coverings.

At one point I collected machine embroidery patterns for making textile pieces to complement the style of the furniture. And yesterday, I FINALLY made for DH my first Arts and Crafts themed pillow.

linen remnant gingko pillow

Er, sorry about that moire effect; it’s the first time I’ve noticed it so prominently in a photo. Perhaps because the linen fabric slubbing catches light and shows off the warp and weft more dramatically than other fabric? How does one fix a moire effect in a photo? I am posting a tag on here for “Weekly Photo Challenge: Pattern” because that is the theme of the challenge for this week. The photo has a moire pattern going on, although it’s not sought after. If you want to see more Pattern photos in the WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge, click here.

Sewing divas must be using linen a lot more lately, because I’m finding great pieces of it in the remnant bin at Joann’s. Thank you, sisters, you know who you are and I appreciate you!

thanks for the linen remnants

Linen is made from the flax plant. I love to picture an old-fashioned flax spinning wheel with its birdcage distaff overflowing with fiber. I have a large cache of well-used table linens from my grandmother, that are still in majestic shape, even with so many washings and ironings and applications of starch. Linen fabric is thick and lustrous. However, one wrong glance, touch, or breath out of place, and it’s wrinkled.

The embroidery design for this pillow is a stylized gingko vine. I plan to make more textile items using the gingko and other popular Arts and Crafts motifs: dragonfly, moth, lily. I tried to find the source of this design but I couldn’t discover where I bought it from; so sorry. I also found a treasure trove of machine embroidery designs for a quilt at Secrets of Embroidery. That project will be a long time in the making! But don’t you agree that the painstakingly hewn and polished and hand-crafted (complemented with machine tools) furniture needs a hand-pieced and theme-embellished quilt to set it off?

settee, with pillow

matching Morris chair