Peridocially I write a post titled ‘Browsing with Pinterest’. Today I have ‘holes’ on my mind again, and invite you to dip into one of my own Pinterest boards with the theme ‘holes’. Pinterest is such an interesting app for those of us who, in an earlier life would have cut pics from Mum’s old magazines and pasted them into a large blank paged scrap book, often without comment. When I was young kids also collected playing cards for their images, haggling with fellow collectors to exchange something we really wanted from their collections in turn for something we hoped they’d want from our own pack. sometimes what you wanted needed two cards to be handed over… and so people built quite large collections, some almost too much for young hands to hold and manage, she remembers with envy.

Just the process of browsing and cutting out images we liked was so satisfying, possibly ‘therapeutic’ using a C21 buzzword, and a perfect ativity to help keep kids occupied on a rainy afternoon, in the same class as sorting out Mum’s button jar, and choosing the best ones for extra attention. When we tired of that, or the sun came out, all the buttons went back into the jar to be sorted again another day. Do kids still do that? Indeed, do people still remove buttons from discarded clothes, or change buttons to give a new lease of life to an aging garmet? It was all about the process, saving or cutting out, maybe sorting, but not necessarily doing anything more. If you kept a few loose you always had something interesting to paste onto the protective brown paper cover on your school books.

Pinterest subscribers can go online to look for something in particular or just just browse through the images Pinterest selected for us to see because of images we’ve previously saved. It is no exaggeration to say that you can spend hours enjoying images in exactly the same way as we carefully thumbed through discarded colour magazines. To cut up old womens magazines was ok, but we’d never have dared to cut things out of a National Geographic, regardless of age.

A hole’s essential characteristic is that you can see, or have some glimpse, of something beyond the edge of the hole. Holes can be deliberate or accidental, can imply deterioration by aging or be part of something called ‘lace’ , on which I’ve mused before.

I have several boards or ‘themes’ for images I save, and holes is one collection to which I fairly often add an image. Holes intrigue me for their potential which is not limited decorative patterning. Enjoy my board!