Last thursday morning I clicked on one of the Pinterest messages that quite often come, but which I put to one side for when I’m in a browsing mood – I was waiting for a webinar to begin, and very quickly came across two fascinating artists’ images.

First up, I found a beautiful work by Maryse Dugois and visiting her website was astonished to find that her sculptural installations use fine tissue paper. Some constructions in white on her home page seem like anemones and barnacles. I’m not psychologically equipped to work in such ways with fragile tissue paper, but this article and the images of her work did remind me of some 3D constructions I made in the 80s, and urged me to try using plastic, and using scrap fabrics. I need to finish off this post and get to my work room to play with materials, licketty split. As you know from my previous posts, I’ve been stitching onto some clear plastic I’d bought yards of in the USA without any clear plan, except that I knew I need to work with it. In a needleweaving and low relief sculptural phase in the mid 80s, I made several works in which I constructed 3D things a bit like sea anemones – circles of buttonhole rows that build up into dimensional shapes. Typically they started with a base circle of backstitch and built up from there. These quick experiments might not look much, but add much to that 40+ years’ experience:

Another image on Pinterest that caught my eye was one I clicked on to see the maker’s name and it took me to tanglewoodthreads.blogspot.ca/ The artist, Penny Berens, of Novia Scotia, lives in a rural wooded area with nearby lakes and ponds. Her highly celebrated, award winning hand stitched textile art is beautiful – comprising natural hand dyed fabrics and threads, with inspiration from landscape shapes textures and markings in her own natural surroundings. Her stitches are simple, running sitches and other straight stitches mostly, coming a she does from a quiltmaking background, which really shows in many of her images. Researching her name, I found that SAQA.com published an indepth interview with her several years ago, and that reminded me I’d seen some of her amazing art some time ago.