It's Done!! My Scrapbook of Europe (Europe 10)

     I completely finished the Europe quilt on the weekend. I have even managed to clip all loose threads (I think) but, it turns out my camera does not want to cooperate.  My daughter came by to take photos.
     Although the maps lay flat on the fabric in the beginning, the extra stitching / quilting of the background fabric caused the maps to pucker loosely in the middle. I ended up having to go over every orange thread highway I had created, as well as some of the outlines of the pictures

Haarlem, Netherlands

centre of town, Rothenberg, Germany

     I thread-sketched the tulips on the background instead of making a separate picture: two reasons ... didn't want the wall-hanging to look cluttered and I really liked the background fabric & didn't want to cover it up.

Rothenberg, Germany --- one of the gates in the town wall

Florence, Italy

     It was so hard to create the awesomeness of this cathedral. There was so much detail --- I gave up on trying to make all the statues in all the little alcoves; the picture was too tiny to add them.

Colosseum, Rome, Italy

     I have seen pictures of the Colosseum everywhere but did not expect it to be so HUGE!  It amazes me how some of the buildings were created all around this site without the cranes and backhoes and equipment that we have today.

Cinque Terre, Italy

     Here is a place that I need to return to ... and perhaps walk the mountain path that connects the village along the coast. My tour friends and I took a boat to visit 4 of the villages.

Beaune, France

     The Burgundy region .... even though many of the places we visited were not that far apart (compared to traveling in Canada), I was amazed at the differences in architecture between one country and the next.

Paris, France

     And last, but not least, Paris .... a few too many people in all the 'touristy' spots, but I enjoyed walking the several kilometres from the cathedral to our hotel on my own, stopping into little shops and taking many photographs of buildings.
 
 The additional thread-sketching that I did on the background fabric: 1. the tulips (top, mid-right), 2. Amsterdam (top left), 3. the gondola in the Alps, Switzerland (middle right), 4. the gondola in Venice (bottom right) and 5. a cathedral top Rome (bottom mid-left).

     13 pictures in raw-edge applique or thread-sketched and six maps to represent 3+ weeks of travel.  Not sure what I will do with the rest of my photographs (close to 400!) ... there are a couple that I would like to do as stand-alone larger pictures. We shall see....