It is called, simply, “Embroidered Tablecloth,” and at first glance, that’s exactly what it looks like: A snowy white linen and cotton covering embroidered with abstract flowers in thread the color of a raw T-bone steak, inviting a diner to dinner with a matching porcelain plate. Sit down – the surprise is likely to bring you to your knees anyway – and pick up the plate. It’s stitched to the fabric like a button on an Alexander McQueen gown.

You haven’t fallen down a rabbit hole; you have entered the surreal world of Hella Jongerious. Knitted glass-fiber lamps, embroidered vases and fabric candlesticks, oh my! It’s as if, like Alice, you have been slipped a sip from Meret Oppenheim’s famous fur-lined teacup, and nothing will ever be the same.

And that, thank heavens, is the whole point as Jongerius marries traditional craft and contemporary technology to create what critics have called artistic industrial design.

The Dutch-born Jongerius, who insists upon calling herself a designer not an artist, began her career in 1993 as part of the innovative Dutch collective Droog Design and since 2000, her Rotterdam-based company, JongeriusLab, has been producing everything from furniture for Vitra to fabrics for Maharam.

“She is one of the most talented, intense and influential designers in the world,” says Paola Antonelli, curator of architecture and deign at the Museum of Modern Art, which has several Jongerius pieces in its collection. “She is always surprising, never abrasive, and through projects such as knitted lamps and embroidered ceramics, Jongerius creates poetic interpretations of simple, everyday objects.”

Ida van Zijl, curator of applied art and assistant director of the Centraal Museum, Utrecht, says that Jongerius’ “personal touch” that connects her objects to the users has made her “one of the few Dutch designers, along with Marcel Wanders and Job Smeets, who has succeeded in translating the hyper-individual approach of most Droog Design objects to industrially mass-produced products by major firms like Vitra.”

Those everyday objects include “squishable” soft sinks and vases made of colorful polyurethane; a felt and metal stool in a cartoonish squiggle shape; and a slightly warped porcelain dinner service so perfectly off-kilter that it ensures table-time conversation as sparkling as the illuminated words on “Crystal Frock,” the party-dress-shaped chandelier Jongerius handmade for Swarovski.

“Collecting industrial design is the hot new thing,” says Darrin Alfred, assistant curator of architecture and design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. “Jongerius’ works are tactile, they’re beautiful, and you can use them every day. You can’t do that with a Van Gogh.”

By using mass production to create works that look as though they were hand-crafted, Jongerius brings vibrant new life to old, familiar forms. Her Kasese Sheep Chair, which is in the collections of MoMa, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Centraal Museum, Utrecht and the Dutch Textile Museum, is based on a hand-carved three-legged African prie-dieu. The high-tech carbon fiber form, which folds, is covered with handmade felt.

“It’s one of her more iconic pieces,” says Alfred. “Jongerius is like a modern-day alchemist who uncovers secrets of the materials and lets them speak for themselves. It’s all about putting an old-fashioned product in a new guise.”

The very pattern of “Repeat: Dots,” the fabric she designed for Maharam, doesn’t so much speak of her design principles as scream them out at warp/weft speed. The distinct white dots were inspired by the holes the Jacquard cards punch into the fabric when it is woven, and some of the bolts even have the card patterns silkscreened along the edge. The repeats themselves are pure Jongerius: They repeat so infrequently that each bolt looks custom made.

Form and function aside, it is Jongerius’ sense of aesthetic fun that so fascinates. One can’t help but be amused by the art of her whimsical series Nymphenburg Sketches, low porcelain bowls that have statues of birds, bunnies and other creatures plopped down in the middle of the pattern as a surprise for those who clear their plates, and by Crystal Candleholder, a series of graduated glass plates that look like a stack of diner dishes waiting to be washed.

Her other projects, which include gallery and museum exhibitions, exude the same disarming charm. In “Bed in Business,” part of her “My Soft Office” exhibit at MoMa’s 2001 Workspheres, a computer screen embedded at the foot and a keyboard and mouse incorporated in textiles creates a high-tech working space that wouldn’t allow for even the laziest worker to sleep on the job.

Suffice it to say that the art of Jongerius’ work lies in the very fact that by design it’s not meant to be a work of art. Neither is a Delft bowl, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be. Just ask Jongerius, who blithely placed its Dutch blue design on the inside, where only the user can see it and then only when it is empty.