Painted Map

In late 2010, I created this quilt for the Thread Tails and Vapor Trails traveling quilt exhibit commemorating the 100th anniversary of Naval aviation. Since my husband is a navy pilot and I am an art quilter, of course, I had to enter.

It's titled Orion Odyssey. ("Orion" is the nickname of the P-3 which my husband flew.)

You can see lots more pictures on my blog here.

Below you can see part of the map section of the quilt. You can read about creating that map here.

Creating this quilt was a real struggle. I rearranged, sliced, painted, re-stitched, re-cut, removed, layered and fussed with this quilt way too much. The quilt recently came back to me after more than a year of traveling around the country. I'm glad it have it home -- there are a lot of things I really like about it. (And some I don't.)

The map is one of the things I really like! The gold dots you see in the photo above are actually tiny gold beads that mark all the places Jeff has landed a P-3.

I recently pulled out some of the freezer paper stencils I cut to create the map. After all that work, I couldn't throw the away. Here's Africa.

Here's Europe and Asia. I think North and South America are curled up on the left.

I cut this entire map with an exacto knife. For the quilt, I used the opposite cut-outs which I guess I threw away. I could only find the positive shapes in my stencil files.

I've been thinking about what I'll create for this new map challenge. I'm thinking of cutting more freezer paper stencils. I need to add exacto blades to my shopping list.