Photography courtesy of Priscillia Woolworth (@priscillawoolworth).
Priscilla Woolworth is a green goddess: for decades now, she’s been speaking out about the climate crisis and coming up with artful, approachable ways to avoid waste at home.
“I got the idea to make placeholders when I found some American sycamore bark on the ground. It’s often curled but lots of pieces were just flat enough.” After experimenting with paint—”too messy”—she got out a stencil sheet she’s had for decades and found that it worked well with Sharpie fine point markers.
For placemats Priscilla used the paper wrappers from six-packs of Quilted Northern Toilet Paper: “I recently came across this new product at my local Hannaford supermarket: no plastic cover and no paper around the individual rolls, which are made from FSC-certified paper.”
Priscilla notes that she always smooths out and saves any reusable paper—grocery bags, crinkled kraft packing paper—to decorate with stamps or paint as wrapping paper and placemats.
The Quilted Northern wrappers are printed on one side and blank on the other: “I wrote to the company and told them they should pattern the reverse side with something simple, such as stripes, so it gets reused.” She painted hers freehand with paint she had on hand and hung the finished work to dry on her laundry line
For pattern making, Priscilla says “any shape in repeat en masse looks great.”
Priscilla’s flatware is vintage hotel silver, a heavy silver plate bought at an LA flea market: “it’s great looking and so study.” Her white dinnerware is “nothing fancy; I’ve had it for years.”
Priscilla’s table is on the deck of her house overlooking the bottom of her garden and Taghkanic Creek. Her metal chairs are Tolix-style and her linen tablecloth is by Libeco ( read about the virtues of linen in our Object Lesson).