While smoking is now banned in most public places, in the Victorian era cigar smoking was a favorite pastime. In America the habit became even more popular (and affordable) after Cuban and Spanish tabaqueros moved to Florida and set up the world’s largest cigar factory in 1880. “Many homes had a private drawing room where men would gather to smoke and visit,” notes Jill Holt, textile curator for the Oklahoma History Center.

Victorian women (a few of whom bravely smoked cigars) put the habit to good use. From the 1880s to 1920, the cigars were sold in bundles, wrapped with brightly colored silk ribbons embossed with the brand name. The women collected the discarded ties, one by one, and fashioned them into decorative pillowcases, tablecloths, quilts and smoking jackets, typically using log cabin, zigzag, or crazy quilt patterns. The cigar ribbons were such popular collector’s items that in the early twentieth century the tobacco industry encouraged women to collect more—and their husbands to buy more cigars—by coming out with silk and flannel novelties. (The Kaufman Museum in Kansas has a traveling exhibition of these items, “Better Choose Me.”)

Look closely at the tablecloth and you’ll see the brands: Upmann, Alfonso and Grand Opera. Yellows and oranges were the favored colors, along with black-and-white stripes, light blue, pink, green and occasionally crimson. Larger works are increasingly rare, making tablecloths, bed-sized quilts and jackets highly prized.

This tablecloth measures 51 inches square, and boasts an abstract pineapple log-cabin design. With a center panel of linear bars surrounded by angled triangles and trapezoids, it is almost modern in its aesthetic. Each edge band has been embellished with an eyelet, creating an unusual ribbon fringe, and the textile is hand stitched to black cotton set with an acid-free agent and treated with heat to prevent bleeding. Placed in a black-painted, hand-gilded Italian molding and protected with UV-resistant acrylic, it makes for strikingly modern wall art. And it is allowed indoors.