Harlan Pruitt, master of velvet, corduroy and floor cushions

Fourteen years old, with a broom

I was fourteen in 1968 when I took a job sweeping the floor of an upholstery shop in High Point, North Carolina. That town has furnished American living rooms for better than a century, and back then every block smelled of glue, sawdust and new cotton batting.

For most of a year the owner would not let me near a needle. I swept, I sorted scraps by color, and I watched his hands. He closed a seam so neat you had to tip the cushion to the window light to find it. The day he finally handed me a curved needle, he told me what I have told every apprentice since: a seam is a promise.

I kept that promise on wing chairs through the seventies and on showroom samples for the furniture market after that. Most shops were nervous about velvet and corduroy, so those became my trade. Turn one panel of velvet upside down and the cushion reads as two colors. Press corduroy carelessly and the wale remembers it.

Floor cushions came to me late. My grandchildren grew up living on the floor the way young families do now: a thick base, a backrest, two firm bolsters, and everybody piled where the coffee table used to be. I learned that a floor cushion takes more punishment than any sofa. It gets jumped on, slept on and dragged to the sunny window every Saturday.

The pieces I read here are made by hand, one at a time, and I read them the way I read a sofa on a showroom floor. The edge first, then the nap, then the corners where the strain lands. When somebody asks me about a crease that won't lift or a cover that zips hard, I have usually made that same mistake myself at some point in fifty-odd years.

I joined the atelier because I cannot teach everyone across a counter anymore. What I can do is answer plainly. Brush velvet the way the pile grew. Steam out shipping creases in the first week, not the fifth. Order a swatch before you try to match a cushion you already own. And if you are buying a modular floor sofa, know which pieces you might want to replace one day.

What is the oldest cushion in your house, my friend, and does anybody remember who sewed it?