At their best, social media can provide wonderful communications with people you’d never normally come across in your daily life or your travels.

Take this example – on Instagram I’ve been following @stripeypebbles for some time. This UK woman, Julia Sugden, picks up/collects striped pebbles on nearby beaches as she walks, takes them home where they accumulate. She photographs them wonderfully, and after that I’m not sure what she does with them, but if she just rolls them around in her hands, places them on the table or window sill where the light catches their shapes and lines, or plays knucklebones with them – whatever – that’s pretty well what many fabriholics aka’ ‘quilters’, do with their fabric stashes! She also takes wonderful shoreline photos but I did have a feeling she draws or paints them, too, but I looking around her sites I couldn’t see reference to that. Today Julia commented she was taking some back to the beach, as they’re threatening to overwhelm her studio. I know plenty of traditional and art quilt makers whose studios could be said to be ‘overwhelmed’ by their stash of fabrics, too, and no, honestly, I’m not one… but I’ll write about that some other time.

Like me, she likes stripey things, and a photo she posted a day or two ago really reminded me of a favourite brooch I bought at an art/craft fair years ago. It’s so ‘me’, and has been aired quite a bit lately as, since the passing of Queen Elizabeth II I’ve made an effort to wear pieces from my minor collection of brooches more often.

Another thing about this photographer/collector is that she often posts her daily haul in what I think of as a 9-patch format quilt block – 3 rows of 3 squares of fabric, with play between two colours or light v dark values:

The Nine Patch is really my favourite traditional quilt block from the brief time I spent making a traditional quilt (Flying Geese) when I joined a quilting bee for the cultural experience, and stayed on with that group, even as my own quilt making moved into the wonderful world of ‘art quilts’. Many others in that group were also veering off into the non-traditional fibre art, plus writing, hand dyeing and marketing fabric, book publishing, lecturing on legal issues and teaching. A very creative group of people, this was so far were the hardest group I’ve ever had to leave, anywhere – but I digress.

My regular readers know that much of my fibreart is based on pieced or appliqued strips and stripes as in these examples, but there are heaps more some of which you’ll find if you scroll back through older posts here.