Saturday, January 23, 2021

Map making

Hi, I've been hibernating for a bit. It's always good to get back to creating art and blogging. I hope that you're surviving the winter so far. 😊

Map of another childhood place

Valerie S. Goodwin is the guest artist for TextileArtist.org's Stitch Club. Valerie is a retired architect and college professor, and a well know artist who creates wonderful textile maps (see Related links below).

For years I've been wanting to make a project based on maps and buildings of my childhood places. The last project that I made in the Stitch Club workshop was a hand-stitched piece of the Toburn Mine, part of the Mile of Gold in Kirkland Lake Ontario. I mentioned that this might be the first piece in Glimpses of Childhood Places. Well, it looks like I've made the second piece.

My grandparents' place in Kenogami Ontario

This is just outside of the area since it's in Kenogami Ontario, about 20 minutes north-west of Kirkland Lake. I was in my teens when my grandfather retired from working in the mines. He and my grandmother moved to a small trailer park just off the highway, next to the river and tons of trails. My grandfather spent a lot of time fishing while my grandmother had a small garden, hiked and cross-country skied behind the park. You can see my grandmother's garden and my grandfather fishing in the river.

The trailer park and my grandfather fishing

Google Map - Kenogami ON
Making a map

I started by finding the map in Google Map and then drawing the area that I wanted to work on.

Valerie suggested that we paint silk organza to use as layers for the map. Since I had already dyed a dark blue piece of silk organza, I painted one piece with Tulip Fabric spray paint (Hawaiian Fizz) and used a dropper to add slightly watered down Pébéo Setacolor (turquoise) on the other.

Drawing of the map
with notes

The turquoise was lovely but much lighter than I wanted, so I place a piece of dark green batik under it. This lightened the batik and added soft lovely colour around it.

I drew the map onto a piece of Ricky Tims' Stable Stuff and then started covering it with fabric backed with a fusible web. I didn't want to work directly on the stable stuff since it was too white. I added strips of off-white batik on most of the background except for the river.

I placed the dark green batik to the forest background and then added some of the painted organza over and around it.

Adding free motion stitching

I used some slightly darker brown fabric for the trailer lots and then some very light yellow for the highway and a darker batik for the road to the park.

For the river, I placed the darker blue hand-dyed silk organza at the bottom and then added the painted, lighter blue on top.

I then free motion stitched everything down. I was going to keep it simple but when I got to the trees I got carried away - so I added more free motion stitching to the water.

Adding embroidery stitches

I used a variety of stitches in the project: backstitch, running stitch, blanket stitch, chain stitch and French knots. Most of it was done with Perle cotton.

What I learned

I had a really hard time deciding on what to use for my map. There was an area around our home that would have been great, but I wanted it to be during the winter. Then I got into all kinds of technical considerations like how to illustrate a hockey rink or a tobogganing hill without adding people or having enough colour when everything is covered in snow. It was just getting too complicated, so I found another spot to illustrate.
I bought Valerie Goodwin's book, Art Quilt Maps. It's been on my wish list for a long time, so it was time to get it. It's really great and I look forward to making more maps in the future with Valerie guiding me through her book!
Large kraft paper journal to hold on-going projects
I didn't think that I would be making another piece of my childhood place so quickly, but when the opportunity presented itself, I just had to embrace it!
I've created a big journal with kraft paper to hold some of my work-in-progress. This is perfect for my Memories of Childhood Places pieces as well as some of the larger embroideries that I'm working on.
I'm not sure how I'll finish this project, but it's probably best to wait until more pieces are done so that I can have a bit of consistency.