my first custom map!
My past week has been spent working on this custom map. Actually, wait, that's a bit of a lie, because I didn't spend all week on it -- I spent a couple of nights rendering my template map and then I took a day to stitch it, with several days between the two, during which my life as a homeschooling parent carried on.
The map was for one of the people I met at the print fair I did back in September. She'd taken my business card and asked if I could make her a map of Sicily in dark purple thread and I'd told her I'd be more than happy to. I waited for her to email me but nothing appeared in my inbox, and randomly, I decided to actually check the email address listed on my card (I'd assumed everything gets forwarded to my primary account). Lo and behold, there was her email from the very day of the print fair. It turns out, when I set up email forwarding on that account, I didn't double check that everything was working and clearly it wasn't. And this had been set up (or really, not set up) seven months ago! ARGH. Needless to say, I was kicking myself hard. But I sent her an apologetic email and with a couple of follow-ups about the map specifications, we were good to go.
It's been ages -- I'm talking a few years -- since I've sewn islands. That was actually what I started out doing when I first embarked on sewing maps onto paper. I began on letter-sized paper, and then decided that I needed to go larger to capture the detail on the island edges, so I moved on to 11x17" paper. As per the person's request, this map of Sicily was to be A3-sized. It's been a while since I've worked on anything that large but man, I was excited. It's a bit of a different feel and I love being able to get as accurate as I possibly can (that's me being neurotic, as usual). I was actually nervous about starting to poke the holes because the last map I'd sewn was in March. Yes, March, as in seven months ago! Not to mention all the gravity that a custom map holds too! It's a bit like the slight anxiety I have about starting a new notebook, how everything had to be absolutely perfect and just so. Well, that sort of anxiety amplified about a hundred times. But I forged ahead and at the end of the day (literally), I was pleased with how it'd turned out, considering I had no mental concept of how the final product would look.
I delivered the map this evening and she seemed to like it when I unveiled it. I'm so glad, as I was afraid she might not. I'd actually contemplated sending her an image of the map when it was completed but Lucas said it probably wasn't necessary unless she asked. Anyway, now that I've done that map and revived my map-sewing, I'm itching to do more. I remember Lucas previously saying that he could see the bulk of my work one day coming from custom maps, which I think would be fantastic as people could present some really interesting places to sew which I probably would never think of. Well, until that happens, I've got my own series of maps I'd like to work on and now that I've finally gotten some paper (yes, it took months and months of dragging my feet just to get paper!), I'm all set. Game on!