This is my Box

Not quite the box in Amahl and the Night Visitors, nor Pandora’s. More like a Treasure Box filled with stitched fragments from the past 5 years, which is how long I have been making them. With the exception of a few sold, a couple given away, and two that have been framed and hang on my walls, these are the entirety of my handstitching work.

I may never sell any more of them. There is something precious about each of them. Perhaps it has to do with the time that goes into each of them, or the story that evolves as I stitch, or the amazing combo of texture and color that is difficult to achieve with paint alone. My husband saw me going through my box, adding recent fragments to it and said he could see an art show here. I told him if I ever did exhibit them, it would likely be just for exhibiting and not for sales.

I love the poetry of Emily Dickinson. I read some time ago that many of her poems were found under floorboards in her bedroom after she died. It is inspiring to me, in this age of sharing everything on Instagram (in which I vigorously participate😂), to have a body of work which is not brought out for public view or consumption. In researching the validity of this story about Dickinson’s poetry, I read that the Emily Dickinson museum states there has been no evidence to support this floorboard discovery. What they did find, was a needle under the floorboard…probably from stitching small pockets onto her dresses and aprons for putting the scraps of paper and pencil with which she wrote her poems during the day as she went about her daily chores. I love that.

I fancy that these fragments filled with stitches are my under-the-floorboard poems. Even though several of them have seen the light of Instagram, and reside in a plastic “box”, I’m content to let them pile up as I go on stitching scraps.💚