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Archive for May 1st, 2012

The Merry Month of May

Tuesday, May 1st, 2012

May is going to fly by for me. I hope I can make all my deadlines.

Above is the last of the purple 3 X 3s with some hand stitching. Here is the whole month together.

I will be playing with green in May. I put away all my purple fabrics and scraps and starting looking for greens. I have a dearth of green fabrics. I had loads of purple because I don’t use it much in my work. I use greens quite a bit. Also, many of my greens fit into the yellow green category, which I will use later.

Here is my first green offering.

I hope you all went over to the Twelve by Twelve blog and checked out all of the cool map quilts. A great variety of ideas and creative takes on the theme.

You Are Here

Tuesday, May 1st, 2012

Or, at least it is where I am. I was almost the last person to post my map quilt on the Twelve by Twelve blog – a first for me. I had to add the red arrow and photograph it this morning. I ran out of time last night.

This is my version of a topographical map of the area of NW Oregon where I live. I am not one of those people that walks around knowing where N, S E and W are in my environment. When we lived in California, I used visual cues. I knew that the brown hills were on the east side and the green mountains were on the west (ocean) side. In fact, I prefer a list of visual aids to get myself someplace. I do like the blue dot and the blue line on the Mapquest App. They seem to help me navigate a map.

So, I originally planned to make a map with pretty pictures or the blue dot and line. Life intervened and I had to come up with something that would not require a lot of right brain activity.

I found this map on line.

I enlarged it to 2o+ inches in length and cropped it to 12+inches. I printed it on freezer paper and cut it apart to make pattern pieces.

I was going to hand dye some silks for this, but again, I had to punt and used batiks from my stash and I think it was a better decision!!

Here are the pieces fused to the background fabric.

The brown areas are the highly populated areas. The blue is the Willamette and the Columbia and the green areas are the heavily forested areas.

When I was done quilting, I thought the background batik was too light, so I used a colored pencil to darken it a bit.

Here is a detail shot with the arrow showing about where I live. Now, I can look at my map and remember which direction has the Pacific Ocean.

I will post my last purple 3 X 3 and the first green 3 X 3 for May later.