Or, at least it is where I am. I was almost the last person to post my map quilt on the Twelve by Twelve blog – a first for me. I had to add the red arrow and photograph it this morning. I ran out of time last night.

This is my version of a topographical map of the area of NW Oregon where I live. I am not one of those people that walks around knowing where N, S E and W are in my environment. When we lived in California, I used visual cues. I knew that the brown hills were on the east side and the green mountains were on the west (ocean) side. In fact, I prefer a list of visual aids to get myself someplace. I do like the blue dot and the blue line on the Mapquest App. They seem to help me navigate a map.

So, I originally planned to make a map with pretty pictures or the blue dot and line. Life intervened and I had to come up with something that would not require a lot of right brain activity.

I found this map on line.

I enlarged it to 2o+ inches in length and cropped it to 12+inches. I printed it on freezer paper and cut it apart to make pattern pieces.

I was going to hand dye some silks for this, but again, I had to punt and used batiks from my stash and I think it was a better decision!!

Here are the pieces fused to the background fabric.

The brown areas are the highly populated areas. The blue is the Willamette and the Columbia and the green areas are the heavily forested areas.

When I was done quilting, I thought the background batik was too light, so I used a colored pencil to darken it a bit.

Here is a detail shot with the arrow showing about where I live. Now, I can look at my map and remember which direction has the Pacific Ocean.

I will post my last purple 3 X 3 and the first green 3 X 3 for May later.