Atlas of the world

I entered a quilting competition. Last year when I tried to enter my quilts were made up too small.
So, stayed with my theme a bit but there are some different thought. Last year's quilts can be found at this link: http://journeyalonganordinarylife.blogspot.co.za/2015/06/as-night-follows-day.html
Below is the rationale for this year's quilt.

I have always loved maps, the irony that we have proofed the earth to be round but in almost every representation it is shown as flat.

Instead of creating the shapes of the continents I have used the day and night effect across the earth and illustrated it with colour. The sun moves from east to west, the light breaks through the darkness, but there is cold and warmth within the daylight hours. There is no clear line where night becomes day, it is a vignette of ever changing colour, sometimes subtle, sometimes dramatic. 

Horizontal lines (machine stitching) are the latitudinal lines and indicate to us how far we are from the equator. I have shown the bulge of the earth with the middle band and the equator sits somewhere within it. The middle is not exactly in the middle, and it represents my perception - the southern hemisphere, where I live, is familiar to me so I view it as larger, more vast than the areas unknown to me. Similarly, although I am showing the movement of sunshine across the earth, the sunlight falls on the areas I have explored while the rest, the unknown, is in darkness. ‘There be dragons’, and all that. 
The circular ‘flares’ represent the different countries I have visited. But truth be told, it was usually a city/town, or two or three within that country, therefore the representation here is vastly exaggerated,  and in all honesty on this scale my travels seem insignificant. I have duplicate the countries in the border to replace  the legend you would normally find on a map. Countries in the north at the top, countries in the south at the bottom.

There is hardly any true darkness on the quilt because we all try and light up the night. The bead work is representative of the starry sky and the magic of our dreams. At night our imagination is more active because in the darkness we are left to create the shapes of the things we cannot see and within that lies the magic. Daylight provides practicality and reality and night time gives us dreams and magic.

The longitudinal lines and time zones are suggested with the striped fabric band at the top and bottom of the map.


Few things are more enjoyable than lingering over the atlas and plotting a trip. J. Maarten Troost

Countries represented: South Africa,  Namibia, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Kenya, Tanzania and Zanzibar, Uganda, Swaziland,  Mozambique, Mauritius, Botswana, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, Paraguay,  Colombia, Britain, Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Monaco, Italy, Liechtenstein, Turkey.