Upping Needlework's Game

This week’s rummage round the Net dredged up a story about up-cycling furniture with embroidery. Embroidery I know about. But up-cycling? This is new.  Good thing there was a picture to illustrate the concept. 

Needlework Upholstered  Chairs

I smile to myself wryly. When I was furnishing my first apartment -- in the last century mind you -- sprucing up old furniture was called refurbishing.  Later Eco-conscious kids, now in their 40s, came up with “recycling.” Saving the planet while not spending the earth fitted their zeitgeist.  But in her day my grandmother, who reused her mother’s linen chest, knew it as common sense frugality.

So now giving objects a second life is up-cycling.  To me up-cycling sounds like rescuing pieces from a former inferiority, giving them a boost up the aesthetic ladder. After all, who would want to live with “down-cycle” items?  Well actually those up-market folks who buy authentic antiques, real retro, or vibrant vintage. They see “cool” not “inferior” in things from the past.

But I do digress. Refurbishing, recycling, up-cycling.  Never mind what it’s called. It’s good it’s happening! And that needlework is part of it. 

This example of up-cycling I found is quite appealing.  Art deco chairs upholstered in baroque and romantic themed needlepoint is visually interesting.  A recent design school grad would call it a mash up!  An art critic would say the mix of styles created “tension.”  Whatever, I like it. I suspect that price of needle-pointed canvases at rummage sales has just gone up. Maybe psychedelic bargello or the needle point designs by Erica Wilson , whose husband was a famous furniture designer by the way, may be up-cycled into vogue again. 

  

As seen in the V& A shop

Certainly the combination of hand-embroidery and furniture seems to be in.  On a visited to Victoria and Albert Museum in London, I came across a striking embroidered chair in their shop. With apologies for the photo quality, it is a style combo if I ever saw one. The straight lined stitching, Suzani embroidery from Uzbekistan, in a flamboyant folk motif worked very well on a contemporary chair 

design from the “mid-20^th century.  (I have to keep remembering my “contemporary” is my kid’s retro!)  The price certainly made them exclusive! Selling for just ₤1,500 or about $2,500, the piece was hardly up-cycled, although its stylistic elements were.  

Another very clever embroidered piece I came across in a Dutch magazine is less expensive.  It is a table, literally stitched together pieces of pegboard.  Talk up up-cycling lowly materials into something trendy.

 

Pegboard and ribbon side table

There is not much new understand the sun, is there.  There is a time to come, and a time to go…away for a bit.  Ideas and things do resurface. Take the old, which by now is odd, add a bit of branding and you get pizzazz, engendering acceptance by the trend-setters, and there we go again. 

Embroidery’s reappearance in home decorating is encouraging. Maybe it will rekindle an interest in creating needlework.  Never underestimate the power of trends. You can ride them, but you can’t buck them. Upwards and onwards, needlework!