Incredible Late 18th/Early 19th Century Prisoner of War Book Shaped Straw Work Sewing Box with Four Inlaid Watercolors soft seascape For 40 years

For 40 years

and then what look like hummingbirds

then flanked with two red birds and "God is Love" and then more birds and trees and vines and lion and heart and urn or basket of flowers

I love this wonderfully creepy-cheerful

But also a lovely thing just to set somewhere

Incredible Late 18th/Early 19th Century Prisoner of War Book Shaped Straw Work Sewing Box with Four Inlaid Watercolors soft seascape For 40 yearsThe chance of finding and bringing home an object like this is what gets me out of bed early in the morning to go to a show and being a box, this itself embodies opens up as a series of discoveries. (For me this box also very much embodies the joy of looking and learning, as it is only recently that I've been awakened too the extraordinariness of late 18th early 19th century Napoleonic prisoner of war straw work. more on that below). This is a sewing