Ulla-Stina Wikander Covers Vintage Objects In Embroidery

Here’s something you don’t see everyday: a dial phone. Add to that a layer of vintage embroidery and you get an object that’s both the epitome of kitsch and a one of a kind artifact. Such are Ulla-Stina Wikander’s embroidered art pieces.

Covered in cross-stitch embroidery they present motives that are typically Swedish. Those include small red cottages in the countryside with blue sky and birches, as well as wild animals, like elk, deer, and birds, often seen in woodlands.

Born in 1957 in Gothenburg, Wikander has been working as an artist since 1986, but has been collecting embroideries years before that. “I started to collect cross stitches […] but I didn’t know what to do with them,” she told HAHAMAG. “I found them beautiful, and I admired the work behind.”

It was only in 2012 that she began to “dress up” vintage objects with her collected embroideries. “I decided to try to cover things from the ’70s, a sewing machine, a typewriter for example, and it went well,” she explains. “It was like you saw the objects for the first time, and you weren’t sure of what you were looking at.” The finished objects are statement pieces, to say the least.