Textile artist Sarah Gibson Wiley captures life’s singular moments.

(Photograph by Adam Ewing)
Artist, interior designer, and seamstress Sarah Gibson Wiley gives her clients an inspired way to capture their favorite memories. Since 2012, Wiley has been creating pillows that artistically replicate photos of weddings, pets, children, family homes, and beach vacations. Through embroidery, stitching, and colorful fabrics, the images come alive as textile art.
The impact of Wiley’s fabric artwork goes beyond a framed photograph. Each piece becomes a comfortable part of her clients’ homes. “Instead of just looking at it,” Wiley says, as she pats one of her designs, made up as a comfortable sofa pillow, “they live with it.”
Wiley’s path to textile art is dotted with a series of creative pursuits culminating in her business, Huger Memories. The great-granddaughter of artist Charles Dana Gibson, who created the “Gibson Girl” in the 1890s, she grew up around art and naturally began making her own.
She learned to sew at 14 and went on to make window treatments for herself, and later, for others through her interior design business. For 28 years, she translated her comfortable lived-in interior design style for her clients, following in the footsteps of another well-known relative, interior designer Nancy Lancaster—owner of the design firm Colefax & Fowler—who is widely credited with establishing the English country house look.

(Photograph by Adam Ewing)
As with most creatives, Wiley found herself looking for a new challenge. “I bought an embroidery machine, and I moved to monograms.” For several years, she turned out elegant monogrammed linens and accessories but, in the end, she says, “I didn’t like the precision it required.”
Seeking a fresh use for her embroidery machine, Wiley began tinkering with the colorful fabric samples she’d used in her interior design work. “I started with children’s drawings—parents would give them to me.” She’d scan a child’s simple creation, trace the lines on the screen, and transfer the image to her embroidery machine which stitched what she’d drawn. “Soon, I was getting photos of houses and pets—anything memorable that had a story,” she recalls.
Today, the small studio behind her house in Richmond is stuffed with fabric remnants arranged by color and pattern, complicated-looking digital equipment for designing and embroidery, and plenty of examples of her work. Assistant Allyson Dickinson keeps it all neat and tidy and keeps the business humming.
Wiley’s new trajectory has been about capturing memories with an emphasis on style, color, and wit over sentimentality. “As we get older, we appreciate memories even more,” and this is a permanent way to preserve them, she notes. For a time, she marketed her wares at design shows, but ultimately decided to focus on private commissions. “Whatever they want, we try to make.”

(Photograph by Adam Ewing)
Wiley’s process for each pillow begins with a phone call, not an email. She wants to hear the emotion in her client’s voice, to pinpoint the meaning behind the image. After the initial conversation, Wiley begins each project by creating a line drawing, or mock-up, of the image, which she then sends out for approval. Then, Wiley moves on to the fun part—the client’s backstory about the image inspires her choices of threads and fabrics from her large stash.
“It’s like a painting,” she says, of selecting the colors and patterns that will go into each pillow. At times she takes creative license with a photo, adjusting the scale of a house, for example. Clients don’t see the work until it’s finished. Wiley loves the element of surprise that they experience when they unwrap the finished piece.
Over the years, Wiley has created pillows and wall hangings of houses, weddings, family portraits, children, and lots of pets, including a hedgehog and a lizard. “I’ve learned so much about all the different types of dogs,” she says, rattling off the nuances between Frenchies and Bostons, goldens and labs and, of course, the mutts.
She welcomes the offbeat commissions, too. One woman, who’s loved Joan of Arc since childhood, asked Wiley to stitch the saint in full armored regalia—with her own face in place of Joan’s. A few years ago she did a series of pillows inspired by famous faces—from fashionista Iris Apfel to Larry David, Oprah Winfrey, Willie Nelson, Frida Kahlo, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. For one dedicated fan, she recently completed a custom Tom Petty pillow.
Because the design and finishing process combines her creative and practical skills, Wiley says she’s found a medium that suits her perfectly. Her strengths lie in combining colors and textures, a strong sense of proportion, along with a bit of mechanical know-how that comes in handy when the embroidery machine misbehaves. “It’s like my whole world has come together,” she says with delight. HugerMemories.com
This article originally appeared in the April 2022 issue.