An (E)Toile in the Making

I found fashion inspiration in the unlikeliest of places for me: the Home and Design section of the NYT. While I certainly admire a well-styled home, I don’t put any pressure on myself to follow suit, with a just-turned-three-year-old lad and two lassies under nine chez moi.

However, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about something I saw on Thursday.

The Times did a brief profile of Richard Saja, a textile designer who has, in the words of the NYT, been “interfering with toile for years” (that sounds so naughty, doesn’t it?).

In a nutshell, Saja embroiders whimsical designs on the veddy serious toile figures; he puts fur on humans, clown costumes on people, and bugs on flowers. His bug-on-flower pillows were seen in the Bill Murray film Broken Flowers.

As I just happen to have, in my reddish-pink fireplace room, three ten-footish-tall narrow windows, all adorned in red-on-white toile, I now have a new project.

I can see embroidering romantic rose vines on the rope swing that one comely lass is sitting on. And then, to punk it up, I’d give one of her companion sheep a sleek yellow head and a purple French-knotted body. Maybe green hooves.

I’ll do only a couple of images on each curtain, as I think less is more in this case. But this will be fun, and a great way to postmodernize my ladylike curtains.

Wouldn’t a formal ballgown be cool if it were customized in this manner?