Loving Earth Project panel

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."

Then I started my panel.

The first step was to cut a backing of white fabric 13-1/2-inches square. 

And I made paper patterns for the four sections of the landscape. 

Then I picked out fabrics to create the landscape: Sky, green hills, dry yellow fields, and black, burned land at the bottom.

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. 

Then I sewed them all down by hand, starting at the top with the rolling green hills. 

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.

When the background landscape was finished, I made the green tree at the top right. First I cut out my drawing to use as a pattern, and traced it onto the green cotton.

Then I cut that, leaving an edge to fold under, and appliqué it to the background landscape.

I appliquéd a tree trunk on top of the tree.

The next step will be the flaming tree at the bottom right!