Lotta Gray interprets LINUM.

“You’re our customers, but also our followers and our readers. You mean everything to us. Without you, there wouldn’t be any ‘we’. That’s why, with the utmost creativity and innovation, we’ve taken on the serious task of creating varied content for you, content that we believe you’ll both enjoy and benefit from. We want to work with the industry’s best stylists and photographers, but also other creative women and men who we think could add something interesting. It’s for that very reason that we met with the artists Elisabeth Biström, Josefin Tolstoy and Cajsa Wessberg during the year, but also interviewed the climate journalist and author Maria Soxbo and the editor-in-chief Jesper Tillberg. We produced guides and descriptive texts, with the aim of making it easier to hang curtains, set a nice table or just make the bed, and we paid home visits to see how our brand comes to life outside our online store.

This autumn, as part of our own PAOLO relaunch, we’re trying out a new approach. We let journalist and author Lotta Gray interpret our PICCOLO bedspread by means of a fictional story. Knowing and seeing that our products get reused from one generation to the next, it goes without saying that there are plenty of stories out there that people could tell about them. Lotta’s text is fictional, but could easily be true. Do you have a story that LINUM plays a starring role in too? Don’t hesitate to contact us. We’d love to hear about it and perhaps even spread your interpretation further.”

Charlotta Dahlqvist, COO LINUM

It was sometime in 1989. I remember it very clearly because it was during those years of my life when almost everything was chaos. I moved around a lot and crashed on friends’ sofas, worked extra shifts in the grocery store on the corner of Hornsgatan and Götgatan in Stockholm and my money always ran out before the end of the month.

It was actually a very chaotic time where as a young adult you ended up in a sort of dead end, where your thoughts about your life as a young person were mixed up with demands, expectations and a general predictability. Everything that I detested. I didn’t stay long in anything; everything was consumable. Friends, boyfriends, colleagues and superficial acquaintances. Absolutely everything was constantly replaced and at breakneck speed.

But one thing remained constant throughout all those years – into adulthood, parenthood and, now, as I’m growing older. It’s clear as day to me: It’s how tightly I held onto my huge grey-blue velvet comfort blanket that constantly followed me throughout life’s ups and downs. A bedspread that’s now so soft and flexible from the ravages of time that it’s impossible to get rid of, with it being so composed of memories, events and happenings.

I got it from a friend who moved into my little one-bedroom flat when we were about 25 years old. I had almost no bedding, but she arrived at the flat with two bags of clothes and a large bedspread. It had some kind of padding inside the squares and I remember it being soft and often finding myself collapsing into its vast softness whenever she wasn’t home. I also often went and laid down on the sofa bed in the hall, on that puffy, big bedspread, as if we had a secret pact with each other.

When she finally left, forgetting to take her puffy blanket with her, it wasn’t a problem. I didn’t say anything, and didn’t remind her, but pretended like nothing was wrong when we saw each other during bar-hopping rounds or at friends’ houses. And so it stayed and became mine.

I moved often, spring-cleaned and chucked quite a few things away and had to choose carefully what to take with me as I was always living in cramped spaces.My grey-blue blanket was a always a no-brainer. It comforted me at night and warmed me in cold winters in poorly insulated apartments and it never judged me, rather it let me be in all my clutter and was always there for me when I needed comfort.

Life gradually became brighter and gained a few more boundaries and structure. A steady job, a nice boyfriend. An apartment with our names on the door and a cat bought at Blocket. Suddenly there were two of us sharing that soft, smooth bedspread – the cat and me. She tore threads in my grey-blue cotton velvet blanket with her claws as she purred, but I rarely scolded her; it just created more memories and added a certain patina to my constant companion. And when I became pregnant a few years later, I often lay and breastfed with my grey-blue blanket, sloppily rolled up as a support behind my back.

Trends came and went. Colours changed, and décor didn’t last very long after I’d become an adult and my finances were in a better state. I quickly grew tired of things, just like when I was younger, but my grey-blue bedspread always stayed. It often lay at the edge of the bed, but sometimes it ended up on the sofa amidst baby bottles, toys and baby sick. It was a bit too big to wash in my machine, but I didn’t care. We had a sacred relationship.

Many years have passed now since we first laid eyes on each other, my grey-blue blanket and I, but everything’s still the same. The children are big now, have almost left the nest and are rarely home. I, on the other hand, spend more and more time in my own company and am enjoying it. My home is bright and warm, with great importance having been placed on timeless materials and classic design.

Every little thing has its place. Sometimes I run my hand over my bedspread, and often think of my friend and feel the texture under my hands, let my fingers run along my old puffy pal and tug on the now torn cotton threads that stick out here and there. The memories wash over me, how we danced as young adults in my little kitchen in Söder, that time I didn’t have any clean towels and had to wrap myself in my grey-blue best friend to dry. My first kiss with my husband, and then the great joy my children got out of using my grey-blue blankie as both a picnic blanket and a tent.

You and me, me and you, through the twists and turns that life takes us.

Text: Lotta Gray