On Pinterest I found a lovely way to present lots of little snippets of textile fibre and even painted art in a Pinterest image by UK artist Mary Morris, and there are more images of this work here It’s a fabulous work, so I saved the image, and have been thinking about it for many months. It bubbled to the top of my mind during the The Stitch Club workshop by Gwen Hedley, and it struck me that this would be a good time to try to make a small shadow box style presentation for the paint+stitch work I did. These boxes are about 2″ square, and I got far enough with the sample to know it could work for me, too.

I did another one for one of the small works/samples I’m doing in the SAQA 100 Days Reboot challenge I’m doing. This time the boxes are a bit smaller 🙂 so that four fit in the allotted 3.25″ sq space. I stiffened the walls a bit by painting them with gold+medium mix – but when dried the walls certainly are stiffer, though the gold was too dilute for any great effect:

The boxes are made from the same lightweight canvas, but making this sample showed me:

• The boxes are just too small – as the wobbly walls between corners are quite pronounced on such a small thing
• I think some stitching in the construction is needed to draw the sides of contiguous boxes closer together
• For flat things inside, the height of the box walls needs to be a bit lower still
• but it would be fine for stuffed, slightly puffy forms inside each box
• The gold’s too dilute – there’s no dramatic effect.
• Spray painting with gold or other colour after construction’s complete will be better
• This is definitely worth tweaking and doing again.