Handcut Silouhettes, Pine Needle Beds & Cracked Teacups.

I wanted to share with you all an excerpt from my ‘newsletter’ this week.

In sharing Delphie, with my subscribers, I wanted to explain a bit about the inspiration behind her sweet hand-made & hand-painted egg. Briefly, in her eBay listing I mentioned the artist who inspired the silhouette painting, but left much of the story out. Here’s the excerpt.

Delphie’s egg was inspired by an article in February’s Victoria magazine. The article featured the handcut silhouettes of Sharyn Sowell. When I saw them, I immediately fell in love. Sharyn is such a talented artist & snip, snip, snips the most beautiful, whimsical scenes. They inspired the painting on Delphi’s egg. And they’ve been on my mind since I first saw them.

Why was I so instantly attracted & head over heels in love with those silhouettes? A few days ago while painting the little black bunnies on Delphi’s egg, it came to me. They remind me of my favorite book as a child, The Boxcar Children. The illustrations in those books were simple black silhouettes depicting the brothers & sisters on their journey. As a child, I longed to be one of the boxcar children. Every night my mattress turned into pine needles. I imagined sipping cool milk from glass bottles & bathing in the creek. The thought of a simple stew made my belly rumble & I pined, yes p-i-n-e-d for chipped teacups & just enough plates to do. I often dragged my cousins & brother through the woods, in search of those perfect little items.

How funny that, in a way, I still have a want to be a Boxcar Child. Sweet, chipped dishes make me smile. Hairline cracks in ironstone or white porcelain make me swoon. So instead of getting tossed, those items get to hold my soaps or brooches or one dried, single rose. I no longer have the urge to sleep on a bed of pine needles & quite prefer my nice pillow-topped mattress. But I always hope that my stew turns out like the stew in my head…the stew the boxcar children ate after Henry brought home left over vegetables from the kind doctor’s garden. And I still imagine drinking cold milk from a glass bottle even though I really, rarely have an interest in milk.

There are pieces of that story inside me. The hows & whys run deep, I suspect. But how lovely, in the middle of an ordinary day, while flipping through a magazine, to be reminded of the girl you were so many years ago. Although it took quite a while to figure out why those little black silhouettes made my heart leap, they certainly did make it leap!

Ah, the things we fall in love with as a child.

Here is an example of Sharyn’s artwork. This was taken from the Victoria article. I am truly smitten.