I love Pinterest, and have several boards of things that interest me, and if you’re curious, you can browse through those here https://www.pinterest.com/alisonschwabe1/

For the uninitiated, Pinterest is exactly like a scrap book that you build for yourself online.  You set it up with your own ID etc and then you can browse around whatever you’re interested in and ‘pin’ anything you want to keep.  To get you started, Pinterest suggests about 40 broad interest categories, from recipes to gardening, tattoos to renovation ideas, acrylic fingernails to textile arts, and much, much more, limited only by your own interests or imagination.   Once you start finding things you like and pinning/saving them onto your own boards, Pinterest keeps sending you boards and pins by other pinners that they think you’ll like – sometimes great but they’re also often waaaay off!   You can even have a couple of secret boards, hidden from public view, but I can’t imagine why one would need that.  I have 11 boards and though I’ve saved one or two recipes and a few particular artists, mostly I am interested in design, texture, contemporary embroidery, fibre and textile art in general, so my 11 boards mostly relate to those things.  I have learned about some exciting contemporary artists whose work probably would otherwise have remained unknown to me, and enjoy following a pin with a visit to their website if they have one.

I have found it interesting when following other pinners’ pins, that people who really share interest on certain things I choose do tend to be fairly focused; they don’t pin every gorgeous thing they see online but select something special, meaningful.  By contrast I’ve come across people with many thousands of pins on hundreds of boards – and really, how does one keep track of all that?   And, I’ve found with such people that a quick scroll down will produce a bewildering array of stuff I have no interest in, so I back out quickly, there being so much more great stuff around.   I’ve noticed that <20 boards listed beside someone’s name, even if they’ve pinned several thousand pins, often points to a discerning, thoughtful pinner, and can be worth at least a look.

I am covering the pieces of a black tetrahedron and plan gold paint+stitch on the surface, and this morning was looking for this little fabric sample in the box – another of my storage systems.  Unmounted, not named and without any notes on it, nevertheless it is part of my ‘scrapbook’ or morgue, too, just as Pinterest images are.  Enough – gold paint, thread and recorded book await me upstairs.

This week, my photographer here in Montevideo, Eduardo Baldizan  took pics of a number of my tetrahedron shapes.  This one is called “Rainbow”, and like all in this series so far, is 18cm x 18cm x 18cm x 15cm.   The dimensions result from the size of the quilter’s equilateral triangle I used to cut the shapes out of template plastic, it being a workable size for what I was planning.  The previous couple of previous posts give some insight into my construction process.

Of course, cutting plastic shapes leaves scraps, some of them odd shaped, as in these ones from stencil making.  I don’t throw such things out in a place where I’d be lucky to find any of this particular material in a shop here.  Only yesterday was thinking that all these pieces are surely useful for something.

It’s marvellous how the brain keeps turning things over while you’re asleep.  This morning around 4am I was woken by a bunch of party goers out in the street, who eventually got in a car and drove away.   Bless them – it took ages to get back to sleep; but in that time I had several brain waves, beginning with how useful these could be in making elements for use in the little collage pieces I have been doing 

and presenting on little 20cm x 20cm canvas stretchers.   For example, they could provide a base over which threads could be wrapped to provide a warp for needlewoven elements as in this 1987 creation “Behind The Scenes 2”, which back then were mounted over cardboard.

And further, elements could be placed with a spacer behind so it appears to float a little above the rest of the collage.  I was so excited this kept me awake for at least another hour.