Palace Curtain Kimonos Opened a Yearly Craft Auction

Seven handmade kimonos cut from Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle curtains went to a silent charity auction in December 2023. They were the first public lots in a Dumfries House craft line that has now spent three Christmases turning royal drapery into sale pieces for the King’s Foundation.

Seven Kimonos From the Windsor Storeroom

King Charles III put the charity in touch with curtain storerooms at Windsor Great Park, where out-of-use royal materials are kept and repairs are done. A spokesman for the King’s Foundation said it was very much the King’s idea to use the curtains.

In early 2022, students on the Batch Production Skills course at Dumfries House in East Ayrshire, the charity’s headquarters, received a bulk delivery of 50 metres of surplus drapery in 30 patterns. The cloth spanned more than 40 years of window design from the 1950s to the 1990s, through the late Queen’s reign, and is believed to have hung in family and private rooms.

The donated curtains had been archived and catalogued at Windsor. Excess went north to the textile rooms. Jacqueline Farrell, education director for the King’s Foundation at Dumfries House, said the students were handling historic royal cloth, and that the first job was simply to see what they had.

It felt like Christmas morning opening such a box of treats for the students to work with.

Jacqueline Farrell, education director, The King’s Foundation

The foundation later listed seven one-off fashion pieces for a silent Christmas auction with no set guide price. Money was earmarked for the textiles programme, which was heading into its tenth year.

THE SEVEN LOTS

• Delft blue coats: Four Delft Blue Floral Kimono Coats, three medium and one large.
• Vintage rose: One Vintage Rose and Duck Egg Short Kimono, one size.
• Burnt orange: One Damask Burnt Orange and Teal Short Kimono, one size.
• Denim damask: One Bold Denim Blue and Yellow Damask Short Kimono, one size.

Scottish model Riley Dodie, from Glasgow, wore the coats for photographs at Dumfries House by Lewis MacKenzie, including a Delft coat in the Blue Drawing Room. Bids ran from Sunday 3 December 2023 until 23:59 on Friday 8 December on the Givergy platform, alongside dinner in the Garden Room at Highgrove and stays at Dumfries House Lodge and the Granary Lodge at the Castle of Mey.

The estate account posted the lots while the sale was live.

Curtains that formerly adorned the window frames of Royal residences Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace have been upcycled by students here at Dumfries House into one-off kimonos that are currently being auctioned in The King's Foundation 2023 Auction.https://t.co/dHqSExDmbA pic.twitter.com/SkwSIx1x2z

— Dumfries House (@Dumfries_House) December 3, 2023

The first drop was easy to read as a joke about royal thrift, floral damask from a palace window offered as a coat. The work sitting behind it was a training exercise on a 2,000-acre estate the King saved in 2007, using industrial machines and a course built to feed luxury fashion jobs.

The Kimono Pattern Wastes Almost No Cloth

Each garment took eight to 10 hours to tailor by hand. Students devised two styles, a longer coat and a short kimono, after rummaging through the bundles and facing a design problem Farrell later described in plain terms: how to turn traditional curtain cloth into something people might actually wear.

A kimono cut was chosen because it is one size, it moves between home and evening wear, and its geometry is a near-zero-waste pattern. Patchwork, dyeing and embroidery let the 30 patterns sit together without pretending the cloth had ever been fashion yardage.

Farrell said the students had created versatile garments that reflect a piece of history, and that the King has long wanted people of all ages to keep the hand skills that luxury fashion still needs, so graduates can take jobs in the trade. Leftover cut-offs, even the smallest scraps, were booked for school programmes so the delivery could meet a zero-waste target.

That scrap rule is what kept the same palace cloth in circulation after the coats sold. The kimonos were the public face of the delivery. The offcuts were already assigned to the next room.

Dumfries House Already Had the Sewing Rooms

The King’s Foundation, formerly the Prince’s Foundation, runs education from Dumfries House and from other sites including Highgrove Gardens in Gloucestershire. Fashion and textiles sit in two workshops on the Ayrshire estate: an atelier for school groups, and a Textile Centre for heavier vocational work on industrial machines.

Future Textiles, the programme that framed the kimono brief, was started in 2014 to close a skills gap in UK cloth work and to pull in new people with vocational training. It takes secondary pupils, community groups and adults. The foundation’s own 10-year account says more than 7,000 people have benefitted at Dumfries House, Highgrove and Trinity Buoy Wharf in London.

That 7,000 figure is the textiles headcount to date as of the 2024 anniversary. Separately, the charity says it gives more than 15,000 students a year a chance to learn practical heritage skills across all of its courses, not only sewing.

Over 600 secondary school pupils a year already attend sewing and textiles workshops at the Dumfries House studios. The kimono brief sat on top of that machine. It was not a pop-up atelier hired for a palace photo.

Education on the estate also includes training in traditional skills in hospitality, farming, building crafts and outdoor learning. The curtain lots raise money for that wider teaching load, which is why a window cloth from Windsor can end up funding a cook school as well as a sewing room.

How the Offcuts Became Eight Footstools

In November 2024 the same palace and Windsor palettes came back as furniture. Eight wooden footstools, upholstered in delft blue floral, vintage rose and teal, and damask burnt orange, went to another online auction for the King’s Foundation, with a starting price of £250.

The frames were made at the Snowdon School of Furniture, based at Highgrove. Covers were sewn by the Dumfries House Sewing Bee, a community group that has met weekly at the estate since 2016. Simon Sadinsky, then executive director of education, called it the first time the charity had made items that joined two education sites and three programmes.

Battersea Dogs and Cats Home brought dogs still looking for homes to a Highgrove shoot, so the lots launched with a second rehoming pitch beside the royal cloth. The foundation hoped the pictures would help some of the dogs as well as the stools.

The 2024 sale used offcuts from the 2023 kimono delivery, which is the part of the story that never fitted the first-week joke. The storeroom cloth was treated as a stock of teaching material, not as a single stunt.

A separate royal charity sale around the same period, chairs used at the Coronation, raised more than £32,000. That was a different lot list. The footstools stayed in the curtain line.

Sandringham Stockings Raised More Than £22,600

On 1 December 2025 the foundation opened a 12-day Christmas auction of 25 festive stockings cut from curtains that had hung at Sandringham House, the King’s private Norfolk home. The Dumfries House Sewing Bee made them, using hand embroidery, piping and seam matching. Each stocking took more than six hours and carried its own number.

Twenty-four lots were sold. Starting bids were £250. Stocking number 25 was held back as a Christmas present from the foundation to the King. Sarah McClymont, lead tutor for Future Textiles, said working with historically significant fabric had been an honour for the group, and that she hoped winners would pass the stockings down as family pieces.

This was such an exciting project for the Sewing Bee to work on. Being given the opportunity to work with such historically significant fabric was a real honour for them and they are so proud of how the stockings turned out.

Sarah McClymont, lead tutor, Future Textiles, The King’s Foundation

The Dumfries House account of the sale, posted on 23 December 2025, put the result at raising more than £22,600 for the charity. Opening bids did not sit on the £250 floor; some bidders were overtaken immediately, which is what you would expect when the cloth is from the house where the family spends Christmas.

The foundation billed the 2025 sale as its annual Christmas auction, and said it was the third in recent years. The 2023 kimonos and the 2024 footstools were named as the first two chapters, in that order.

THREE CHRISTMAS CURTAIN SALES

No public lot-by-lot total was issued for the seven kimonos, so the 2025 stocking figure is the first hard sum the curtain line has put on the record. The foundation still has not said who bought the coats.

A Training Line That Outlived One Auction

The useful way to read the kimonos is as coursework with a royal provenance, not as a fashion launch. Farrell’s brief to the 2023 cohort was to make a modern collection fit for retail from storeroom cloth. The auction was how that coursework left the estate.

Partners around Future Textiles include CHANEL, through Métiers d’art fellowships, and Yoox Net-a-Porter, through the Modern Artisan programme. Those tracks sit well above a Christmas stocking, but they share the same claim: hand skills still earn a wage if someone teaches them.

THE CRAFT CALENDAR BEHIND THE LOTS

1. 2007: The King saves Dumfries House, later the headquarters of the foundation.
2. 2014: Future Textiles starts after an industry roundtable at the estate on protecting fashion hand skills.
3. 2016: The Dumfries House Sewing Bee begins weekly community sessions.
4. Early 2022: Fifty metres of palace and Windsor curtain cloth, in 30 patterns, arrive for the Batch Production Skills course.
5. 3 to 8 December 2023: Seven kimonos go to a silent Christmas auction with no guide price.
6. November to December 2024: Eight footstools upholstered with the same offcuts are offered from £250.
7. 1 to 12 December 2025: Twenty-four Sandringham stockings sell, raising more than £22,600; stocking 25 is reserved for the King.

By the third sale the joke about old curtains had less to work with. The Sewing Bee was using piping and seam matching on numbered lots, the furniture school had already had a turn, and the foundation was describing the whole run as annual. Whether a fourth curtain drop appears is a decision the storerooms and the tutors still have to make; the teaching rooms are not waiting on it.

Stocking 25 was due to the King as a Christmas present from the people who cut his own house curtains into gifts. The other 24 went to whoever outbid the room. The seven kimonos remain the first garments in that sequence, and the only ones you could wear as a coat cut from a palace window.

Frequently Asked Questions

When Did the King’s Foundation Start Teaching Textiles at Dumfries House?

Future Textiles began in 2014 after the King, then Prince of Wales, convened an industry roundtable at Dumfries House on the role of education in protecting the hand skills that sit under UK fashion. The foundation marked 10 years of the programme in 2024, with courses that now run from one-day school workshops to full-time luxury-garment training.

How Do People Join the Dumfries House Sewing Bee?

The Sewing Bee runs on Tuesdays, with a morning session from 10.00am to 12.30pm and an afternoon session from 1.30pm to 4.00pm, and 12 places in each slot. Attendance is filled from a waiting list, and the foundation asks enquiries to go to its Dumfries House education desk rather than to the auction site.

What Else Does Future Textiles Teach Besides Sewing?

Workshops include hand knitting, embroidery and woven textiles. A City and Guilds certificated Future 30 course for pupils aged 14 and over runs across an academic term, and specialist tracks include the Modern Artisan partnership with Yoox Net-a-Porter and CHANEL Métiers d’art fellowships in embroidery and millinery that started in 2022.

Were Leftover Palace Curtain Scraps Thrown Away?

The foundation said leftover cut-offs, including the smallest scraps, would go into school programmes so the Windsor delivery could meet a zero-waste target. Those offcuts later covered the 2024 footstools, which is why the same delft blue, vintage rose and burnt orange palettes reappeared a year after the kimonos.