One month into this map project and no sewing yet but I've been away so that's my excuse. There was a tiny bit of holiday stitching (more on the blog) but since this is our regular AHIQ date I thought I'd share a couple of map-related moments that got me quite excited while I was away.
We went to Denmark. I had visited Copenhagen before, but nowhere else and this year we booked a place to stay in East Jutland, on the Baltic Sea. I'm not going to bore you with an account of the whole holiday (though I liked Denmark a lot) since a lot of it was pretty standard holiday stuff, but we did make the trip to Billund to visit the Lego attractions. Not so much a theme park person, me, but there is a relatively new thing called the Lego House, which is all about building/making rather than rides and that was genuinely pretty cool.
More to the point, look what I found there.
Fine line piecing anyone?
Or this.
The idea here was that you found a base block, made your building/tree/structure, dropped it into an empty gap and the board lit up, joining your tiny square to all the others. This has me thinking about starting a quilt in a similar way: making the individual elements and finding a way of joining them in a grid. I think this might be a fun way to work with children too or on a group project.
Next up (and I got properly over-excited at this one) was Jelling, site of a rune stone considered to mark the birth of the nation of Denmark, under Harald Bluetooth, and of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. I have Norwegian antecedents,which have always formed a part of my family's sense of who we are, though in somewhat convoluted ways, I think. This place felt like a tangible connection for me between my history, my family and this notion of mapping. Anyhow...
There used to be a huge wooden stockade around this Viking site, now marked out with these white concrete pillars.
Every dark dot marks the location of a wooden upright. (If you would like to see what the wooden original would have looked like, check this out).
Within this stockade, granite slabs (now replaced with white concrete) marked out the shape of a 350 metre long ship.
Best of all was the way they had marked out the position and details of the three longhouses on the side. A huge area of white concrete sits where each one stood,with the findings of the house marked out on it; dark lines mark the walls, dark circles the places where wooden pillars stood.
This is just begging to be the starting point of a quilt.
I think I am going to stick, for now, with my original plan and let this simmer, but I think you can expect to find this topic coming up again.
Next thing is to get some actual sewing started.
4 comments:
Fascinating! I really like the way this particular challenge is pushing all of us far beyond our studios.
Isn't it amazing how frequently we find examples of whatever we're thinking about? I like your examples. The idea of making structures and then figuring out how to put them together reminds me of how you frequently work. This would be a good idea for me to try. And I love the concrete replacements for those archeologic structures. They've been so careful laying them out at the correct location and angle.
I hope you had a wonderful vacation. Now, back to work!
Your vacation must have been awesome! I have a thing about history. It seems that the more I discover, the more I want to know. So I'd love to see this Viking site. I've been thinking about the map project but I haven't been able to come up with a plan. I agree with Ann about your idea. If nothing else, it would push me out of my comfort zone. One thing I like about it is that if three or four of us were to do something like this, we could see how each one interprets the theory. I need to do more thinking on my end.
Yep, travelling down new roads is an great thing to do and even better when the road leads to new treasures. I can't think of another challenge that has been so absorbing to my already busy life. But what a hoot, thanks for this addition to new thinking of maps.
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