Mystery Surrounding Sheena Douglass products

On FB she posted this: 

Dear Crafters
First and foremost I want to address the many thousands of Sheena followers worldwide who have been unwavering in their support over the past 15years or more. I have met many of you face to face in workshops and demos and I feel I have met and shared myself with many more of you, as you have with me, via the medium of our Facebook ‘lives.’
I began in this industry as a crafter, just the same as you and through my personal home crafting and background in artistic drawing I discovered that I had an ability to develop new concepts and a had a huge desire to share those ideas which would benefit crafters of all capabilities. My life in crafting from that moment forward has been steadfast; to bring those concepts and techniques to the wider public and educate you in the knowledge that each and every one of us is capable of making craftwork that they will be proud of. In attempting to deliver this to you I have shared and given everything of myself to the point at times of exhaustion.
Why? Because I know that crafting for the vast majority of us is a release; an escape. I have lost count of the times I have received emails or been told that ‘if not for crafting, I don't know where I would be.’ That has never been lost on me, which is why I continue to work at bringing you free Master classes into your homes and to reach out to those that cannot access me via workshops. What is not publicised is the work I do outside of the public eye with fund raising and helping individuals. I don't want to elaborate on this but at times this spreads Sheena Douglass pretty thin. To me you are my family of whom I care greatly and I apologies wholeheartedly if any of my actions have caused you distress and upset and also to extend this apology outside of our crafting family.
Much has been said recently on Facebook that has been less than kind. During my career I have drawn many thousands of images. The images highlighted here represent a fraction of those thousands drawn. Some of these images are out of copyright and available to us all as inspiration. If I have inadvertently chosen the wrong images as my inspiration I would like to extend my apology to those people concerned. There are occasions when under considerable pressure to deliver on deadlines, short cuts have been taken and insufficient detail has been added by me from the original inspiration. For that I am more than disappointed with myself. I admit that I have made a mistake, I have let myself down, I have let you down and I have let the image owners down for not giving credit to them for the inspiration(s) I have used.
I deeply regret the hurt and disappointment I have caused and I extend my apologies to everyone involved, especially where I have not giving credit where clearly credit was due.
In conclusion, I want to thank Crafters Companion, in particular Sara, Simon and Leann for the last 8 years that we have worked together and for the opportunities that those years have presented for me to share with you. They have always supported me as part of the Crafters Companion family and I wish them well as I step away. My health and private circumstances have led me to make the decision to take a step back from the pressures of deadlines and delivery for the time being. I would like to think that I could still reach you on occasion with craft education.
From the bottom of my heart to everyone of those of you who have followed me and for those of you that I hope will at some time be part of my future, I thank you.
Sheena Douglass

Did she learn nothing from Birdgate and Paige Evans?

I found some of the images in the comments of her facebook page, starting at about November 17. There are some good detectives that found a bunch of them. Also, if you put her name in the FB search bar, there are some posts by artists that have been alerted to her theft.

Wow! That is not inspiration, those are very close to the original copies.

Never heard of her. That theft is blatant. It's almost like she digitally converted the images to hand drawn then just changed the colors. Not cool.

I posted some of them.

i never heard of her either and i couldn't stand reading past the first several sentences of her fb post. too much patting herself on the back there

and personally i think all of those stamps are ugly as hell.

I guess my question is if there are SO many, did Crafters Companian know about it?

Wow. What a shame. If those are her drawings & not digital renderings of the photographs, it's too bad she didn't change things enough to truly make them her own. Using reference material when drawing is normal, but that's way over the line. My mom had her one designs stolen several years ago by a client and was basically told there wasn't enough of a case to go after because they had tweaked it a tiny bit. It was heartbreaking for her at the time. The "client" was a rather large entity too. They used the stolen design for the next several years in their marketing.

I don’t think Paige was the one who stole it. My understanding is that like Elizabeth Kartchner, she comes up with concepts and works with designers at AC who create the actual product. I can’t comment one way or the other if she was aware the designer had used someone else’s design. I have a feeling she just looked at what was presented and signed off on it without being aware. But I don’t think it’s fair or accurate to say she stole it. I’m sure things are being checked and double checked at PP now that it happened. And I’d like to think the designer who works for AC that stole the design no longer works there and learned a lesson.

Wow, little details, alright.

This reminds me of an issue in 2013 when illustrator Lisa Cogdon took giftware company Cody Foster to task for referencing her illustrations in ornaments they made. However, it turned out that she used photos as references for the illustrations she made. It was a fascinating situation when the story broke because she created a huge ruckus when she named/shamed Cody Foster, but then internet detectives found that she was essentially doing the same thing with her illustrations. This is one article, but I remember articles popping up on a bunch of art biz blogs. Crazy.