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Kettle & Cloth
Stories of American Makers
“I stitched pumpkins in that barn every September for thirty years. This is the last one.” — Alma (72) is letting her final harvest curtains go at 60% off before the bulldozers arrive.
The barn on the edge of town is nearly packed up. Her mother’s machine — bought new in 1968, the one Alma learned on — is wrapped in a quilt and waiting by the door. The bolts of cream, oatmeal linen and pale gold voile that leaned against the back wall for thirty years are going into boxes, one at a time. The last things she finished here weren’t altar cloths or christening blankets. They were pumpkins.
“I always started them in August,” she says. “Long before anybody around here was thinking about it. By the time the corn came down my windows were already turned over for the fall. I did it for myself first, and then for whoever asked.”
The parcel changed hands in the fall. A development group bought the whole strip along the road — Alma’s barn, the two buildings beside it, all of it — and the plan is simple: the row comes down. Where the barn stands, there are drawings for something new.
She didn’t let it go without a fight. When the letter came, she wrote back. She went to the county meeting and stood up to say her piece. More than once she asked the developer’s people whether the one barn might stay — she’d keep paying rent, keep it exactly as it was. “They were polite about it,” she says. “Polite, and then the answer was no, every time. To them the whole strip is a line on a map. Nobody on that side of it has ever sat down at a machine and made a thing with their own hands.”
“You can’t stitch in a building that isn’t there anymore,” she says, and there’s no heat left in it now. “I’m seventy-two. My hands still do most of what I ask of them. But the twelve-hour days are well behind me. Truth be told, this was coming either way — the crew just picked the date.” She looks down at her knuckles, thickened from fifty-one years at the machine.
A small river town in southern Ohio. The barn smells of cotton, cedar and the last of the woodstove. What’s left along the side wall are the harvest panels, folded in careful stacks — pumpkins, gourds, garden carrots, goldenrod on oatmeal linen. “These I made because I wanted to,” Alma says. “I can’t take them with me. They ought to go up in somebody’s window this fall, not sit in a skip.”
Fifty-one years at one machine — and the curtains she almost kept to herself
Alma’s grandmother taught her, and she didn’t teach her embroidery first. She taught her mending — collars, elbows, the good sheets. “She never mended anything without leaving something behind on it,” Alma says. “A leaf, an acorn, something. She said if you’re going to be honest about the hole, you may as well give somebody a reason to look at it.”
At twenty-one she sat down at her mother’s machine and never really got up again.
What she was paid for, all those years, was church work. Altar cloths and pulpit falls. Communion cloths. Christening blankets. The lace edging on all of it, worked on by hand. Monograms on wedding linens for families across the county, and for a while for two counties over. “There are churches around here where every white cloth on the table came off my table first,” she says. “I know the wear on them. I know which ones need doing again.”
All of it on cloth you can see through. That, she’ll tell you, is the whole job. “Fifty-one years I’ve stitched on thin cloth,” she says. “Veiling, organza, voile. It’s all the same trick: pull the thread a hair too tight and the cloth puckers, and then you’ve ruined somebody’s christening. A curtain is just the same cloth that has to hang straight for twenty years instead of twenty minutes.”
The harvest panels started at a church bazaar one September in the nineties. A woman stopped at Alma’s table — altar cloths and monogrammed linens out, never curtains — and said she was tired of the only fall decorating she owned being a plastic wreath on the door. “She said everything she put out came out of a box and went back in a box,” Alma says. “She wanted one thing in that house that looked like somebody had made it.”
Alma went home and stitched her a row of pumpkins on sheer voile. The woman hung it over her sink that same evening, and called the next morning.
“She said, ‘I’ve had eleven autumns in this house, and this is the first one that came inside.’ I’ve thought about that sentence for thirty years.”
She never once brought finished curtains to a bazaar to sell. She stitched them quietly, every August and September — for neighbours, for her daughters and granddaughters, for the woman who admired one and went home with it folded over her arm. Close to five thousand panels since, harvest and everyday together. Every single one through her hands. Not one of them was ever sold.
Until this autumn. The barn is coming down. Four harvest designs are what’s left. And for the first time in thirty years, anyone can have one.
What makes Alma’s curtains different
What sets these apart isn’t only the designs, charming as they are. It’s that the pattern is in the cloth, not on it — the same way Alma has done every piece of work since the seventies.
Each curtain starts as a fine voile or an oatmeal linen ground. The design is then worked into that ground stitch by stitch: every pumpkin, every curling vine, every leaf and stem, laid in one at a time and finished at the hem with a scalloped edge or a ruffle. The thread sits well proud of the surface — the pumpkins especially. Run your fingers across one and you feel every single one.
“It isn’t printed on,” Alma says. “Every orange pumpkin you see in a shop this time of year is ink on cloth. Put it in a box for eleven months, take it out again, and it has gone chalky at the folds. Mine won’t crack, peel or wash off, because there is nothing on top to let go — the pumpkins are the cloth.”
That raised thread is doing more work than it looks like it is.
It gives you privacy without taking your daylight. A plain sheer hangs there and hides nothing. A heavy curtain hides everything, including the window. The embroidery sits somewhere no other kind of curtain sits: the pattern breaks up the line of sight — a neighbour across the drive sees pumpkins and movement, not you at the sink — while the cloth around it stays thin enough to keep the room bright on a grey October morning, which is exactly when you need it.
“A printed curtain is a picture of autumn. A stitched one puts it on your counter at nine in the morning.”
It takes the heat and the glare off the room. September is still hot through most of the country, and the sun sits lower every week — which means it comes in hard and straight across the counter at exactly the hour you are standing there. The voile scatters that light instead of letting it fall through in a slab, so the glare comes off the worktop and the sting comes out of the room, with the blind still up. And because the cloth is denser wherever the thread lies, the pattern shades more than the ground around it. What you get around nine in the morning is a row of pumpkins in soft shadow, moving across the counter as the sun climbs.
“Folks put these up in September and write to tell me the kitchen stopped baking in the afternoon,” Alma says. “It’s still ninety degrees out here half of that month. And come October you’ve got the best light of the whole year and most people waste it — sun in their eyes, so they pull the blind, and then they stand in a dark kitchen until supper. You want that light. You just don’t want it straight in the face.”
The window nobody makes a fall curtain for
There is a second reason these ended up in so many kitchens around Marietta, and it has nothing to do with pumpkins.
Walk into any store in September and the fall curtains are 63 or 84 inches long. That length was worked out for a living-room window that runs nearly to the floor. Hung over a kitchen sink it covers the glass you actually wanted to look through, and the bottom of it sits in the basin, where it goes grey before Thanksgiving. So people give up on that window, put a blind on it, and the one room the family actually gathers in never gets decorated at all.
Alma only ever made one size, because her own kitchen only ever needed one: 55 inches wide, 24 inches tall. It runs across the glass and stops well above the sill — nothing hangs into the sink, and the whole top half of the window stays wide open. That matters more in October than in June: the light is already short, and you cannot afford to give any of it away. This is the size that hung over her own sink for thirty autumns.
All four have a rod pocket wide enough for a plain tension rod. No brackets, no screws, no drilling into a tiled backsplash, nothing your landlord has to be asked about. Alma has hung one in about ninety seconds while the kettle boiled.
“And when it gets greasy — because it’s a kitchen in soup season, it will — you take it down and wash it,” she says. “Try that with a blind. You’ll be standing there with a cloth doing one slat at a time and you’ll only do it once.” The voile takes a warm wash and hangs itself flat again in a day; the stitching doesn’t shrink away from the cloth, and it doesn’t go musty over a steaming sink the way natural cloth in a damp kitchen will.
- Handwork, not print. Every pumpkin, gourd, vine and stem is laid into the cloth by hand and stands proud of the surface. Nothing here is printed, so nothing goes chalky at the folds after a winter in the box.
- Privacy without the dark. The pattern breaks up the line of sight while the cloth around it stays thin — cover at the sink without losing the short daylight of October.
- Keeps the September heat and glare off you. The voile scatters the hard, low autumn sun instead of letting it fall across the counter in a slab — less glare, less of that afternoon sting, with the blind still up.
- Cut for the window over the sink. 55″ wide × 24″ tall — wide enough to gather, short enough that nothing hangs into the basin and the top of the glass stays open.
- Goes up on a tension rod. A wide rod pocket on all four. No brackets, no screws, no holes in the tile. Up in about a minute, and down again just as fast when the season turns.
- Washes, folds flat, comes back next year. Warm wash, hang it damp, and it drops flat by the next day. Folds into a drawer over the winter instead of cracking in a plastic tote in the attic.
- The whole harvest set. All four designs she stitched every autumn: Pumpkin Patch, Garden Carrots, Goldenrod Field and Pumpkin Patch Linen Version.
One’s gone up nine autumns in a row
Alma doesn’t keep many records, but she remembers the windows. There’s a friend two streets over she gave a pumpkin panel to years back. “It goes up the first week of September and comes down after Thanksgiving, and it’s done that nine years running,” Alma says. “Nine trips in and out of a drawer, and the pumpkins stand up the same as the day I took them off the machine. Every woman who’s stood in that kitchen in the fall has asked her where it came from. She’s the one who finally talked me into letting other folks have them.”
“That’s all I ever wanted for them,” Alma says. “Not something you buy for one October and throw out in November. Something you put away and are glad to see again.”
This is everything that’s left
The reason there’s a final collection at all comes back to the barn. When the parcel sold, the row was marked to be cleared, and the crew set a date. At seventy-two, Alma is moving in with her daughter — there’s a room for her there, but no room for the machine, the bolts, or the standing frame. “Some things you carry with you,” she says. “Some things you hand on.”
Most afternoons now go to packing — the patterns, the spools, the photographs off the wall. What she finished last autumn is all that will ever exist. No more are coming: there’s no apprentice, the machine is going into storage, and there’s nobody she’s handing the patterns to. “There won’t be a fall run next year,” she says, not bitterly. “The church work found its people. I’m hoping these do too.”
A shop in town once offered to carry them on her behalf at ninety-nine dollars apiece. She said no — it never sat right with her. Now, with a date and a crew on the calendar, she’s done something she has never done in thirty years: she’s cut that price by 60%, down to $39 for a single curtain. “I’m not doing this for the money,” she says. “I’d rather they were up in somebody’s kitchen this October than in a skip in September.” Her granddaughter Sadie (23) is the one who got them online. “I’m no good with any of that,” Alma says, laughing. “She had it sorted before I’d finished my coffee.”
What people say
“My fall decorating was a wreath on the door and a bowl of plastic gourds. This is the first thing I’ve put up that people actually stop and look at. My daughter-in-law asked where I’d had it made.”
“I’ve bought fall curtains before. They were printed, and after two seasons in the tote the orange had gone pale at every crease. You can run your thumb across these pumpkins and feel them. That’s the difference and it’s obvious.”
“I ordered in August because I always get caught out. It went up the first of September and it’s the only thing in my kitchen anybody has commented on all fall. I’ve already put the second one away for my sister at Christmas.”
Where to get one of Alma’s curtains
Alma’s curtains are sold only through Cedar & Tin Co., the small online shop run by her granddaughter Sadie (23) — the one place you’ll find the real panels from her final collection. They aren’t in stores, and they never will be.
“Sadie handles all of it,” Alma says. “At my age I don’t keep up with the internet. She had the whole thing running before I’d finished my coffee.”
Before you order — one size, one thing to check
There is only ever one size: 55 inches wide × 24 inches tall.
The mistake that sends more kitchen curtains back than anything else is measuring the glass and ordering that number. You want more width than window, not the same. Those 55 inches are meant to gather — one curtain dresses a window up to roughly 36 inches wide with a proper soft fold in it. Wider than that, order two and let them meet in the middle. Unsure? Send Sadie the width of your window and she’ll tell you. She’d rather answer an email than post a parcel back.
Payment & shipping: Cedar & Tin Co. takes all major cards, PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay. Orders ship within 2–3 business days. Free returns within 90 days.
A word of caution: as word has spread, look-alikes have started showing up on Amazon and other marketplaces. They photograph the same. They are not Alma’s. Hold one up to the light and you’ll see it straight away: theirs is an orange print sitting flat on the surface, hers is thread standing off the cloth. The real ones come only from her shop.
Update — this week
Demand has been far higher than we expected. More than half of the final 388 curtains have already shipped this week. Once the barn is empty, that’s it — no restock, no reproductions, and no fall run next year. My grandmother is not starting again somewhere else.
— Sadie, Cedar & Tin Co.
The bottom line
This is the fall decoration you won’t throw out in November.
That’s no accident. Alma built them the way she built everything for fifty-one years: to go up, come down, fold away and go up again the next year looking the same. Thin enough to keep the short daylight. Stitched enough that nobody can watch you at the sink. And every time someone new walks through the kitchen in October, they stop, look closer, and reach out to touch the pumpkins.
Thirty autumns she kept these to herself. This is the last one she’ll ever stitch for.
Take one home — with Alma’s personal 100% money-back guarantee
Alma’s parting gift to her readers: a 90-day, no-questions-asked money-back guarantee.
“These should only go up in houses where somebody’s glad to see them come out of the drawer.”
Hang it over your sink. Live with it through a few grey mornings and a few short afternoons. If it doesn’t belong there — if you don’t love it — send it back and get your money back. No questions asked.
More from customers
“Every visitor asks about it. My grandson calls it ‘the pumpkin window.’ And my husband — who hasn’t commented on a single decorating decision in thirty-one years — actually said, ‘That’s nice, that.’ I ordered two more as gifts the same afternoon.”
“It genuinely bothers me that a developer can wipe out thirty years of a woman’s work like it’s nothing. I bought two — one for me, one for my mother. I can’t stop the machines, but I can keep a couple of these out of a skip.”
“I ordered the carrots for the window over my sink and the linen one for the dining room. Both went up on tension rods in a minute flat, no holes in the tile, and they wash and hang flat again by the next morning.”
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Testimonials reflect individual experiences and results may vary. Images are for illustration; because each piece is made by hand, the final product may vary slightly.