Stitching the Valley - Part 1

I never considered myself a person who created things. Certainly, I would not have used the term ‘artistic’. In my early twenties I began to cross-stitch, inspired by my aunt. It continued with learning needlework and sewing from my mother-in-law. The creative explorations included many short-lived experiments with scrapbooking, decoupage, collage, crochet and knitting.  My siblings laughed and called me a nana. I didn’t care. I loved it.

Making things calmed me. I felt connected to a long line of women who tended to life through their hands. I couldn’t name a single woman in my family line who might have done these things, but I felt they were there, and I knew I was one of them.

Making also got me through the harder times in my life. I have pieces of needlework that I made during a long period of depression. I look at them and remember those times. I remember losing myself in the work. It soothed me, and it gave me something to do when I was unable to do anything else. It also prevented me from diving back into the things I had done in the past that no longer served me.

From time to time, still, I feel the pull to stitch something. I feel it seasonally, when the weather cools and the fire beckons. I also feel it when something in me longs to quieten. I want to sit still, and I want the meditative cure of creating.

In this creative ebb I have begun stitching a map of my valley. I had been looking for information about the native plants that would have clothed this valley before the settlers arrived, and I came across a topographic map.  It was part of a parcel of information put together as a proposal to turn the rural valley into residential housing. The proposal was defeated, and a few years later we moved here. 

On the map different colour lines represent the various elevations. I love the tight and loose lines of the hills showing the steep and gentle ranges. I love the open valley floor, traced with snaking blue lines of river and stream. 

Once I have stitched in these natural features, I have a decision to make - whether to add the manmade. The straight line roads that bisect the valley, and the train line that emerges from a tunnel at one end and slices across the corner of the valley before disappearing into the hills again. 

I rode that train as a girl, often. I grew up on the other side of my ranges, in the Wairarapa. The train would stop at the small valley station, and I would look out and think ‘what a beautiful place that would be to live’.