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Kettle & Cloth
Stories of American Makers
“They’re taking the barn. I have weeks, not months.” — Alma (72) is letting the last of her hand-embroidered kitchen 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, sage 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 curtains.
“I’d been stitching them in the quiet hours all winter,” she says. “When my eyes got tired of the fine work, I’d put a curtain in the frame instead. I didn’t set out to make them the last thing. They just turned out to be.”
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. Late in the year. The barn smells of cotton, cedar and the last of the woodstove. What’s left along the side wall are the curtains, folded in careful stacks — every one stitched on sheer voile, every one carrying a design of its own. “These I made because I wanted to,” Alma says. “I can’t take them with me. They ought to go somewhere they’ll be hung.”
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, a little flower, 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 curtains started with a woman at a church bazaar, sometime in the nineties. She stopped at Alma’s table — there were altar cloths and monogrammed linens out, never curtains — and asked whether Alma could make something for the window over her kitchen sink. “She said the neighbours could watch her do the dishes,” Alma says. “And the only thing that fixed it was a blind that put her in the dark all day. She said she’d rather be looked at.”
Alma went home and stitched one. The woman hung it that same evening, and called the next morning.
“She said, ‘I’ve stood at that sink eleven years. This morning was the first time I looked up.’ I’ve thought about that sentence for thirty years.”
She never once brought finished curtains to a bazaar to sell. She stitched them quietly — 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. Every single one through her hands. Not one of them was ever sold.
Until now. The barn is coming down. These 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 ground. The design is then worked into that ground stitch by stitch: every petal, every wing, every leaf and stem, laid in one at a time and finished at the hem with a scalloped edge. The thread sits slightly raised off the surface. Run your fingers across one and you feel every flower.
“It isn’t printed on,” Alma says. “A print is ink lying on top of cloth. Wash it enough times and it goes chalky and starts letting go at the edges. Mine won’t crack, peel or wash off, because there’s nothing to let go — the flowers are the cloth. Fifty-one years on, my hands still lay them in without me thinking.”
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 flowers and movement, not you at the sink — while the cloth around it stays thin enough to keep the room bright.
“A printed curtain is a picture of flowers. A stitched one puts them on your counter at nine in the morning.”
It takes the sun off your counter. This is the part people write to her about in August. The fine voile scatters the direct afternoon light instead of letting it fall straight through, so the glare comes off the countertop and the sting comes out of the room — without the blind coming down and the kitchen going dark at three in the afternoon. And because the cloth is denser wherever the thread lies, the pattern shades a little more than the ground around it. That’s what you see drifting across the counter in the morning: the flowers, in shadow, moving with the sun.
“The west window is the one everybody complains about,” Alma says. “Three o’clock in August, you can’t stand at that sink. And you don’t want the blind down, because then you’re washing dishes in the dark in the middle of the afternoon. You want the light. You just don’t want it landing on you.”
The window nobody makes a curtain for
There is a second reason these ended up in so many kitchens around Marietta, and it has nothing to do with flowers.
Walk into any store and the 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 by Christmas. So people give up on that window, put a blind on it, and after a while stop looking at it 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. The light keeps coming in over the top of it all day long. That is the piece that hung over her own sink for thirty years, and it is the only thing she ever stitched for herself.
Most of them have a rod pocket wide enough for a plain tension rod. Two — Lavender Meadow and Mason Jars — are finished with a stitched eyelet or ring header instead, because that is how Alma liked those two to hang. They all slide onto the same 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 does get greasy — because it’s a kitchen, 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 petal, stem, cherry and length of lace is laid into the cloth by hand and sits raised off the surface. Nothing on these panels is printed, so there is nothing to crack, peel, chalk or wash off.
- Privacy without the dark. The pattern breaks up the line of sight while the cloth around it stays thin. Daytime cover at the sink without putting the room in shadow.
- Takes the sun off the counter. The fine voile scatters direct afternoon light instead of letting it fall straight through — less glare, less of that three-o’clock 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. Rod pocket on most designs, a stitched eyelet or ring header on Lavender Meadow and Mason Jars — all of them take the same plain rod. No brackets, no screws, no holes in the tile. Renter-safe, and up in about a minute.
- Washable, and it stays put. Take it down, warm wash, hang it damp and it drops flat by the next day. Polyester voile doesn’t go musty over a steaming sink.
- Alma’s whole collection. All eight designs, worked over her last winter at the machine: Lavender Meadow, Sunflowers, Lavender Bouquets, Cherry Orchard, Ribbon Tulips, Daisies & Cherries, Mason Jars and Tulips.
One’s been over the same sink for nine years
Alma doesn’t keep many records, but she remembers the windows. There’s a friend two streets over she gave a sunflower panel to years back. “It’s been over her sink through nine summers and I don’t know how many washes,” Alma says. “The cloth’s gone soft the way it should. The flowers stand up the same as the day I took them off the machine. Every woman who’s ever stood in that kitchen 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 fold away because it’s too nice to use. Something you keep up because it works.”
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 over the winter 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. “Nobody wants to spend thirty years learning to do this right,” she says, not bitterly. “The church work found its people. I’m hoping the curtains 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 went to windows that’ll actually use them than into a skip.” 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 kitchen window faces west. For years I pulled the blind down every afternoon and then stood there doing dishes in the dark like a fool. I haven’t touched that blind since these went up. The light’s still there. The glare isn’t.”
“My mother had one of Alma’s christening blankets, so the morning I heard about the curtains I ordered two — one for the kitchen, one for the bathroom. What surprised me is that you can feel the flowers. I’ve bought ‘embroidered’ curtains before that turned out to be a picture printed on.”
“Our houses sit close together and the neighbour’s drive looks straight in at my sink. I didn’t want a blind down all day and I didn’t want to be on show either. This is the first thing that’s solved both. I stopped thinking about that window, which is all I wanted.”
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
One order is one curtain. Not a pair, not a three-piece set — a single panel, 55 inches wide × 24 inches tall. That is the only size there is.
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 a flat print sitting 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 512 curtains have already shipped this week. Once the barn is empty, that’s it — there will be no restock and no reproductions. My grandmother is not starting again somewhere else.
— Sadie, Cedar & Tin Co.
The bottom line
This is the curtain that makes you look up.
That’s no accident. Alma built them the way she built everything for fifty-one years: to be used every single day and looked at while you use them. Thin enough to keep the room bright. Stitched enough that nobody can watch you at the sink. And every time someone new walks through the kitchen, they stop, look closer, and reach out to touch the flowers.
Thirty years she kept these to herself. These are the last ones she’ll ever make.
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.”
Hang it over your sink. Live with it through a few bright mornings and a few hot 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 granddaughter calls it ‘the cherry 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 it for the wildflowers. I kept it because I stopped noticing the neighbour’s window. It went up on a tension rod in a minute flat, no holes in my tile, and it washed and hung flat again by the next morning.”
DISCLOSURE: This is a paid advertisement. The owner of this site has a material connection to the products shown on this page. Please review the full return policy before ordering.
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.