Chocolate is good for you!

I tend to disbelieve almost anything I read in the newspapers but I am prepared to make an exception for the article with the headline: Chocolate is good for you, which featured prominently recently. I used it as inspiration for the ATCs I made for the Colour Groupies this month when our colour combination was Coffee and Chocolate.

I drink my coffee as strong as I can get it and black so that is the background colour for these ATCs. It's machine quilted black velvet.

For the chocolate part I took a photograph of the contents of a box of chocolates and printed it out on fabric and then appliqued it to the coffee background and surrounded it with chocolate coloured size 11 seed beads. The text was typed on my computer and also printed on fabric.

The contents of the box in question has long gone and I must go and buy another one soon, purely for medicinal reasons, you understand!

Grids and Chocolate

Yesterday offered one of those delicious coincidences (known as synchronicity) that makes life such a fascinating journey. On not one but 4 of the blogs I read regularly I came across grids and two of these were in chocolate form, Yummy!

The first occasion was on this post in Tristan's blog, where he featured a picture of a box of chocolates. Like him I fell in love with the picture and it started me on a train of thought of why I so appreciated it. In the interests of serious research (honestly!!) I acquired a large box of chocolates and started to shoot my own pictures. Normally when I buy a box of chocs it is more like a piece of performance art (I eat them!!!) but in this case Tristan made me look at it as if it was art. And I came to the conclusion that it's the grid arrangement that particularly speaks to me. As a quilter I just find this hugely satisfying to my arting soul and as Tristan is also a quilter it probably has the same fascination for him.

Another fellow quilter whose blog I read for inspiration and amazing photography is that of Jane Brocket and loo and behold there too was a post about boxes of chocolate, bought in Paris, no less!! Another great picture and of course another wonderful grid pattern as well as beautiful colours.

Another gorgeous and colourful grid appeared on Carolyn Parker's Rose Blog and this grid illustrated how she stores her Christmas decorations, not all tumbled and tangled together in a box, like mine (!!), but lovely laid out and sorted by colour in separate storage units.. Although this is not chocolate, I still felt like eating this picture mentally.

And finally Helga Strauss, the owner of Artchix Studio, has been running an online class on her blog which included grids and dots in the instructions. Although I did not take part (finally I do seem to have gained some control over my eternally mouse-clicking finger) I did make time to admire all the resulting artwork.

Thanks to Tristan, Jane, Carolyn and Helga to set me off on this train of thought and also for their respective blogs which brighten my life on a daily basis!