Tea Towel Treasures and Other Hidden Letters
2025–Ongoing
A typopgraphy project that investigates dometic artifacts and the hidden legacy and skill of women’s handiwork.
My grandmother used to buy second hand tea towels and pillowcases with initials that did not match her own. She knew what skill and hard work had been put into the embroidery through personal experience, and she wanted to save these precious artifacts.
I have never sewn my initials onto fabric, but I still use the kitchen towels that my grandmother embroidered. Both the ones with her initials from birth as well as the ones she adopted later in life through marriage, AJ and AH. The heritage of her design work hangs visible in my kitchen, lays thrown over my husband’s shoulder, gets stains of tomato sauce all over it and eventually tumbles around in my laundry machine. Works like these embroidered initials, often produced by women, are a living part of our design history that are often overlooked, or sometimes even ridiculed and belittled within design contexts, and this phenomena is not a new topic of discussion as Buckley (1986) writes:
”The designs produced by women in a domestic environment (embroidery, knitting and appliqué) are used by the family in the home rather than exchanged for profit within the capitalistic marketplace. At this point, capitalism and patriarchy interact to devalue this type of design; essentially, it has been made for the wrong place – the home, and for the wrong market – the family.”
Buckley (1986, pp.40-41)
Buckley, C. (1986). Made in Patriarchy: Towards a Feminist Analysis of Women and Design. Made in Patriarchy. Bikini Books, Clube do Livro do Design, pp. 33–65
