While searching for my perfect home, which resulted in the Three friends, I realized that it is always good to have a goal, a road you go on, but it’s best to keep an open mind because what you look for may not be at the end of the road, but on the way and you wouldn’t want to miss that. Of course, a search has no end until you find what you are looking for, but even after I found the perfect home, I still made some discoveries by chance.
I found the prefect home in the image of the scaliform variant of a snail shell. A scaliform variant is a shell that instead of having the whorls tightly coiled has space between them. Before starting to work on the Three friends, I made a miniature version of the shell used as inspiration, which is the scaliform version of the garden snail shell.
And then I forgot about it. I started working on the Three friends and when I was making Goody, I realized the top of the shell looked good on it’s own, which makes perfect sense since that is the part the snail is born with. The rest of the shell grows as the snail grows. So I kept it as a separate textile object.
Recently, I had to illustrate how the snail shell is formed and I figured the best way was to use the miniature done after the scaliform shell and I ended up with my favorite shell so far because it shows a very important feature of a home, which is that of being a shelter.
Because I used two colours for the rope, it looks like a snail is inside the shell. This was unintentional, but that makes it even more important to me, because a lot of good things happen by chance.
The joy of creating 