The items in this picture come from around the world and from different aesthetic traditions, so it’s surprising that they look so good together. At least, I think they look good. You be the judge.

The prints on the quilt squares come from clothing items actually worn by my husband and me when we lived in Indonesia. Some of them are batik; others are more modern tropical prints. In Indonesia, formal dress for couples goes as follows. The man wears black slacks, a black pillbox type hat called a peci (peh-chee), and a shirt made of a batik print. (Batik can come in many different patterns and color schemes.) The woman wears a long, narrow skirt made of the same batik as her husband’s shirt, and this is topped with a lacy, fitted, tunic-length blouse called a kebaya. The kebaya can be black, white, or in a color that coordinates with the batik.

In a tropical country, you don’t wear your clothes seasonally. You wear them year-round, until they wear out. After several years in Indonesia, I had all these worn-out shirts and pants in unique prints that now had sentimental value. Now we come to the second aesthetic stream: #grandmacore. We happened to be living in a place where there was a sewing room, with a small army of volunteer grandmas who were happy to take on sewing projects to help stressed-out young families who had just landed from overseas or were planning to return there. I brought the batiks to the grandmas and asked whether they could make several small quilts, suitable to hanging on the wall, with them. They did a great job!

Our formula so far goes,

Batik + Grandma

The rest of the stuff on the table is more boring. It was all bought in the U.S.A., and what could be more American than Red Hots in a Mason jar? But put on the batik quilt, it suddenly looks planned.

The orange-and-white ramekin, though boringly bought in an American department store, brings another aesthetic stream into this murky pool. It’s from the collection sold by Pioneer Woman, who lives on a ranch in Texas and has monetized her lifestyle with cookbooks, children’s books, and now kitchenware. Most of the kitchenware is colorful and detailed, and would tend to dominate any table it was put on. This ramekin, though a little busy, appeals because the flowers on it look like folk art. And who knew that American-style folk art would play so well with batik? Or maybe it could, because if you look at folk art from around the world, there is a certain similarity.

Batik + Grandma + “Pioneer” + Folk Art = A table I love, and I hope you haven’t hated seeing