This time, a real book - a small notebook bought at Paperchase and filled up with threadwork (aka sewn shapes). I wanted to capitalise on the common response to seeing embroidery - the irresistible impulse to turn it over and look at the back - as this impulse would propel the reader through the book, and perhaps provide some surprises along the way. The idea of islands came to mind, as a group of them (an archipelago, lovely word!) would be separate on one side of the page and joined on the other side, not recognisable as islands at all, and the thread shape might morph into ... something else ...
After stitching a few islands, I felt they were starting to look all the same, so did some looking in an atlas and drawing - these may or may not be recognisable as Mediterranean islands ... recognisability doesn't matter!
Same process with the lakes - observation lends variety to the stitching. These are Canadian lakes. The lakes might have islands within them - or the stitching might cross from side to side (on the reverse), just as the stitching between islands crossed "underwater".
To make the book more interesting, some other mapping features can be added - lines of latitude and longitude, either drawn or stitched - or contour lines on the islands. Rivers running into the lakes? Circles, for cities? Lines to indicate scale (miles/km) or the mysterious 1:50 000 or similar.
A further use for the stitching was for rubbing, which shows the stitching on both sides of the page. Here are some rubbings of two pages at once - to make this work (for the rubbings to be interesting, rather than random) the sequence of images needs some thought. But I'm not very interested in the level of contrivance.
I seem to be rushing into
doing without too much
thinking. Which is no bad thing, at the moment - it's the doing that is generating the thinking; the writing about the process is helping me decide where to take it next.
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