The Prairie

41" x 32"

Detail:   A dear friend grew up in Western Canada on a prairie farm.  Her memories are of the good food, the hard work and the wide open fields and skies, honest living.  For her birthday, I tried to duplicate the essence of the beauty of the farm.  This was very far from my experience but I tried to capture the feeling of her stories.

                     detail:  hay bails.  It took me a while to create the shadow, but from a distance I think I              managed.  Each hay bail was created separately and then appliqued onto the field.

detail:  a truer duplication of the actual colour with the iconic red barn in the background.  The grasses and bushes are all free motion stitchery as are the rows in the field.

detail:  an image of the back where you can get a better understanding of the stitchery.

This was a fun project for me, learning about a different landscape, and trying to capture something so huge into something relatively small.  I thought by having the landscape literally falling off the edge of the work, I was suggesting the endless nature of this world.