Nantucket Estate — 1930s Linen Pillowcase Set With Monogram & Filet Crochet — 2 Cases + 80" Day Cover

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From the same remarkable Nantucket house sale. It keeps giving.
This is a set that understands how beds used to … Read more From the same remarkable Nantucket house sale. It keeps giving.
This is a set that understands how beds used to be made — which is to say, properly. Two standard pillowcases 18" x30" aprox and their matching 80-inch day cover, all in fine white linen, all trimmed with the same hand-crocheted filet lace, all monogrammed in the same confident "N" worked in crochet so precise it looks typeset. Someone had a bed. They had a vision for it. They executed that vision by hand, over many hours, and the result has outlasted everything else in the room by about ninety years.
The day cover is the piece that stops you. Eighty inches of fine white linen edged in wide filet crochet — made to lie across the pillows during the day, to make the bed look finished, to signal that whoever slept here had standards. It also works beautifully as a headboard cover, a sideboard runner, or a very refined narrow tablecloth. It is the kind of thing that looks exactly right in six different rooms and you'll argue with yourself about which one deserves it.
The filet crochet is the real thing — grid-worked by hand, the monogram emerging from the negative space in a technique that takes patience most people today cannot imagine having. The linen has that soft, broken-in weight that new linen pretends to have and never quite achieves.
There are signs of age, as there should be. An old laundry repair — the kind made by someone who intended to keep using this, not to retire it — is visible and honest. This is not a set that has been hiding its history. It is simply a set that has had one.
Three pieces. One house. Ninety years of good keeping.
From Nantucket. Obviously. See less