The Loving Earth Project is an international community textile project, started by a few British Quakers in 2019. They are collecting fabric art panels to use in a traveling exhibit, which will go to Glasgow for the Climate Summit this fall. But the real goal is to encourage us to each explore our connection to some place on the earth, and what action we can take to show our love for it.
You can find a short video introducing the project here.
The Loving Earth Website is here.
My panel is called Crossroads. I wrote a short essay to go with it:
Crossroads: In the Willamette Valley of Oregon, we are at the beginning of a great drought, which is affecting our drinking water and our hydro-electricity. We are experiencing devastating wildfires and extreme air pollution from the smoke.
Robin Kimmerer says in Braiding Sweetgrass that "..all the people of the earth will see that the path ahead is divided. They must make a choice in their path to the future. One of the roads is soft and green with new grass. ... The other path is scorched black, hard; the cinders would cut your feet."
"Ecologists estimate that we would need seven planets to sustain the lifeways we have created. And yet those lifeways, lacking balance, justice, and peace, have not brought us contentment. They have brought us the loss of our relatives in a great wave of extinction. ... we have a choice ahead, a crossroads."
I cut the fabrics, using the patterns, and pinned them in place on the backing fabric.
I decided to sew a couple of different fabrics together in pieces, on the sewing machine, to make the jagged, burned land at the bottom, and top-stitched them with with red.I used a tiny whip-stitch at the top, and larger and larger stitches for the lower two sections, to give some texture and interest.
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