Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Ideas

I've been thinking about the idea of community and what it means to me. The first thing that comes to mind is neighborhood. We live in a "master planned" subdivision that is designed to foster community. Every house is within walking distance of a small park or playground. We have big community events like an Easter Egg hunt, fire works display for Fourth of July and Tree Lighting Ceremony at Christmas. We have one elementary school where all the kids in the neighborhood attend.

We love lots of things about living here. There are also drawbacks. It's easy to feel isolated. It doesn't always feel very diverse. I fear that some people outside of the subdivision may have some negative stereotypical views about the kind of people who live here. Some of those stereotypes are probably deserved.

As all this was swirling around in my head, I considered using a map of our "community" as the basis for the design of my quilt. I found some great images online.I converted a pdf to a jpeg and then zoomed into a particularly interesting area and I divided it into four six inch squares. I printed them out, cut them out and taped them together to make a 12 inch square. Then I traced the main lines onto a sheet of WU release paper with some sharpies.
I like the curvy street lines and all the tiny boxes lined up next to each other which represent each lot. I was still really just playing with the design. I didn't like the large empty area on my drawing. That's the golf course in real life. I had no plan for constructing the quilt. I considered reverse applique, fusing (of course), painting, hand carved stamps.

I was not feeling motivated or inspired. I've since abandoned this whole map idea and moved onto other images. I guess it's all part of the process.

5 comments:

  1. This exploration of a planned community is a nice (and different) facet of our theme. I'd love to have seen what else you could extrapolate from it, but I'm exited to see where else the process has taken you!

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  2. I, too, was drawn to the idea of a map on one of many false starts.

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  3. I'm always drawn to maps too, Deborah, and one of my favorite things of yours is the street quilt you did (that hangs in your kitchen, I think?) Looks like you had fun coloring, even if this doesn't get translated into fabric...

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  5. How abandoned is it?...
    Seeing your pictures really got my heart pumping!
    If you've still got the stuff around and are sure you're not going to go back to it, send it my way. It sounds like a fun challenge!

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