Shell Chic: The Ultimate Guide to Decorating Your Home With Seashells

Shell Chic: The Ultimate Guide to Decorating Your Home With Seashells

Bringing an eccentric creativity to the romance of the beach, Marlene Hurley Marshall shows you how to use shells to bring a sea-infused decorative flair into your own home. Lavish photography, profiles of contemporary shell artists, and simple instructions for 35 remarkable projects will inspire you to get crafting. From adding a few shells to a picture frame or lampshade to encrusting a small bathtub with an eye-catching assemblage, you’ll be astounded at the variety of ways you can brighten your home with shells. The fashion for seashells as decorative material has taken a variety of forms over time, from baroque garden grottoes encrusted with shells to Victorian bric-a-brac displayed under glass. This well-illustrated book by Marshall and Vollmer von Falken (who coauthored Making Bits & Pieces Mosaics) contains step-by-step projects for traditional items of shell art such as flower arrangements and shell-encrusted boxes, all interspersed with a colorful running narrative describing decorative uses of shells by contemporary designers. Highly recommended for public libraries. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. Not a guide to shell games, exactly, but to marvelously creative ways to use the fruits of the sea in and outside the home. In fact, Marshall has produced one of the most unusual crafts-home decor books yet--unusual in the more than 15 projects offered, in the elegant photography by Sabine Vollmer von Falken, and in the wealth of information on collectors, artists, history, and shell life. A profile of painter Ann Getsinger, who specializes in shells, nestles near the sidebar on the Sanibel Shell Fair, a juried show held during the first week of March. Recipes form the author's "Shell Buffet," in which she thanks all contributors to the book, and are featured in the same chapter as a profile of Elegant Cheesecakes, a pastry firm majoring in shell-ornamented cakes. Though well designed and aesthetically pleasing, projects detailed here wouldn't quite fit in the run-of-the-mill home, for these are inventive, imaginative, and almost 100 percent fantasy. Barbara Jacobs Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved "This well-illustrated book by Marshall and Vollmer von Falken contains step-by-step projects...interspersed with a colorful running narrative..." ?Library Journal "Learn new ways to display summer's curvaceous souvenirs from Marlene Hurley Marshall." ?Coastal Living "Marshall has produced one of the most unusual crafts-home decor books yet ? unusual in the more than 15 projects offered, in the elegant photography by Sabine Vollmer von Falken, and in the wealth of information on collectors, artists, history, and shell life." ?Booklist “ Shell Chic awash in color photos of shell-shellacked interiors, has no shortage of ideas. It includes 14 step-by-step projects that also incorporate sand dollars, sea biscuits, starfish and even buttons.” – Palm Beach Post “Looking at sea shells as elegance, Marlene Hurley Marshall in Shell Chic pictures shells as stylish home decorations for walls, ceilings and furniture. Photos profusely illustrate the lavish designs from art works to dress wear.” - Newsday “Learn new ways to display summer’s curvaceous souvenirs from Marlene Hurley Marshall.” - Coastal Living “These beach souvenirs are the rage – from shell chandeliers and shell encrusted claw-foot bathtubs to Christmas trees adorned with shell garland.” - USA Today “From the marvelous to the bizarre, there’s a project in it for anyone – with complete instructions.” – The Times-Picayune There’s much experience behind author Marlene Hurley Marshall's book, Making Bits & Pieces Mosaics , for she has been creating her own mosaic masterpieces for over a decade. Marlene’s work has been exhibited and sold in galleries and museums shops alike in Boston, San Francisco and the Berkshire region of Massachusetts, where she resides. Sabine Vollmer von Falken worked as a commercial photographer in Duesseldorf and as a theater photographer in Berlin before moving to western Massachusetts in the 1980s. Since the beginning of time, people have marveled at the beauty of shells. The popularity of collecting them has ancient origins, and it spans all cultures and classes of society. Yet different people have appreciated shells in different ways. A few shared responses include consuming their contents as a food source; trading them as currency; making jewelry and decorations from them; and using them as tools, vessels, and objects of divination. These uses were born of simple practicality and evolved into decorative sophistication, which included displaying shells in curio cabinets and using them to adorn rooms and grottoes. In the 16th and 17th centuries, collection mania swept through Europe. At that time, collecting shells and shellwork was a hobby of the nobility and the mark of a certain status. Collectors used partitioned wooden boxes and cabinets with cotton wool¹lin