Marie Buffington is a new hand painted canvas needlepoint designer. Her work, as you can see from the pictures, takes a fresh approach to traditional designs. I recently asked her about how she got started. She told me:
Long time ago, I took a tour through the Fulton Mansion. It’s in Galveston Texas and I toured it during my senior year in college (1978). During that tour I was taken by a beautiful pillow sitting on a hot pink settee.
During the following years I guess you could say that I coveted that pillow. It was so beautiful that I wanted one like it. I knew I could make one but alas, I’d have to reproduce it from memory.
I didn’t give it any more thought until one day the Texas Parks and Wildlife magazine did a feature on that mansion and there in the photos was my pillow. So I began the best I could to sketch it out on graph paper from the tiny photo in the magazine.
I discovered I loved the process so much that I wanted to start designing my own stuff and I wanted to use the pillow as my first design. So, I wrote to the Texas Parks and Wildlife to ask permission to publish the design under my name. They owned the mansion so they could give or deny permission. They wrote back and said they would not mind if I published it. They said that it’s a historical piece and sense they do not know who the designer was, to go ahead; publish it.
So I perfected the design by changing some of the colors, used roses instead of pansies and I changed the background too. I call it my historical piece and I made another one like it with different colors.
Through that experience I learned to design needlepoint and I found that I loved designing better than stitching. I also discovered computers; much easier than graph paper!
I have since used other influences such as antique doilies, tin tiles used as ceiling plates on old Victorian buildings, Victorian wood molding, Queen Ann houses and antique fabric as inspiration. I also bought a nice digital camera and I shoot whatever I see around me that’s pretty. Since I have a computer (hope it doesn’t crash!) the camera comes in handy.
Don’t you just love her stuff?
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