I recently blogged about this little textile shadow box sample I made, trying out an idea I pinned on my Pinterest board many months ago. You’ll find further information on that here https://www.alisonschwabe.com/weblog/?p=6783

Today I returned to my Pinterest “presentations” board, to see which maker came up with that bright idea. However, there’s no one answer, because I found that I’ve pinned several others, too, and it’s actually quite a popular method of presentation of artwork, and done in various sizes, not just to show little things. Here are some examples I found:

From detail sections I recognise, I’m pretty certain that the one I pinned and was directly influenced by, was work of the UK textile artist, Mary Morris. Another name that came up in one of the pins I found on my board, which had a ‘Note To Self’ on it to whoever had pinned it – ‘Shane Drinkwater’. It’s an intriguing image of what looks like 6 beer carton halves with painted insides and a section of dot-textured painting placed inside on the base. I searched Shane Drinkwater and found he is Australian (indeed, a fellow Tasmanian) a prolific artist whose painted works are mostly on paper and include a lot of grid-like layouts of irregular lines of dots, textured shapes and patterns of other marks. I found his work quite thrilling, with strong connection to contemporary quilt design and some contemporary Australian Indigenous art too, which is hardly surprising. Another interesting artist working at times with boxes I found was Deborah Benioff Friedman – both the boxes themselves and their real or implied contents are part of her assemblages. Saving the best for last, I found some lovely child-like art at Criando Com Apego which literally means creating with an emotional attachment. This is a delightful website with wonderful ideas to encourage and develop the imagination and creativity of young children – for whoever the website owner is, he/she has a passionate interest in teaching such children. The matchboxes have pictures placed in them, and each picture becomes a part of the whole story …. which takes me right back to my interest in using the shadow box arrangement for segments of some kind of textile to act together to convey something, a story, explore a memory, that kind of thing.

I spent a couple of glorious hours in my studio early this morning, with the sunshine streaming in, making it possible to get this good very close detail shot of the quilting I’m doing – and I’m now about half way along that middle section of circles:

While quilting I’m listening to recorded books, as usual. Jane Austen’s Emma finished late yesterday. This morning I was delighting in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer. That man was a skilled observer of people and his writing is a delight. These and more have been part of a collection of classics – many of them books I’d just never read, others like Jane Austen’s works I know almost word for word as I enjoy them for the umpteenth time.

Instead of reading the news online, as I normally do ‘over breakfast’, this morning I delved into one of the Pinterest advisories from my overnight email. This image interested me:

and I followed the link to the YouTube video and watched how Diane Deziel did this, and wow, how inspiring!! At first I thought that to try this I’d need someone to laser cut heaps of circles for me – but not so. As she demonstrated, it’s something any of us could easily do at home.

Though the video showed me how I could cut heaps of the same sized circles at once, I didn’t 🙂 but instead cut uneven mismatched ovals, and by her method machine stitched them onto heavy duty clear plastic (always with ‘sheer’ in mind) You can just pick out the clear plastic if you look carefully at the photo, and the lines of stitching you can see are edge to edge on the plastic, anyway. It’s all food for further thought.