Hello!
I'm Cameron Acosta

Thank you for visiting my website. My name is Cameron Acosta and when I was born in the 1950’s I was the only girl I ever heard of with the first name of Cameron. Having that name might have inspired me to create things as unusual as my name.

Wanting to create unusual and unique art started when I was in elementary school. I made dolls out of Elmer’s Glue and entered them in a statewide doll show in the category of “smallest dolls. I quickly found out, after looking at the other entries in my category, that if I could see the doll without using a magnifying glass, it was too big. Judges decided to move my entry to the category of “dolls made of the most unusual materials” in which I placed.

In college I learned to weave, using a floor loom and later, out of necessity to save money on expensive weaving yarn, I began weaving with electrical wires and telephone wires which had been discarded in my office wastebaskets when the system was upgraded. This began my theme of turning trash into beautiful things.

In my mountain community I took a class in pine needle basket making - not basket weaving, as most people call it. Pine needle baskets are sewn, not woven. Instead of discarding multiple carloads of downed pine needles I began to use needles in and around my property.

Prior to 2019 I began experimenting with making very tall pine needle vases or sculptures, then trying asymmetrical and whimsical shapes, which proved to be extremely challenging since pine needles have some recalcitrant characteristics.

Collecting, sorting, washing, trimming and dying the pine needles, as well as building and embellishing them, takes countless hours per vase/sculpture, and are tasks that, being slightly OCD and ADHD, I must do.

In order to use as many discarded materials as possible, many of the embellishments are old CD’s used as bases and old jewelry and other unidentifiable items found at garage sales, which I disassemble. Most baskets have secret embellishments inside at the base, only viewed by shining a light down the middle. They are very strong and will probably even survive being tossed out of a moving truck, as long as another vehicle doesn’t run over them.

I make baskets I like, hoping if I like them maybe someone else will too. And I hope you do. Please let me know what you think.