The weblog of Robin Camille Davis

For Christmas last year, I wanted to give my boyfriend, Willem, something that was both meaningful and awesome. Something that was useful, something that celebrated our relationship, and something I could make myself. So I sewed him a quilt that was a map of Providence, Rhode Island, the city where we met.

I began brainstorming in October. I was inspired by similar endeavors like Haptic Lab, but wasn’t sure how to go about it. I’d only made four quilts in my life, and none with the detail I was imagining. I began by laying out a few criteria:

• First, I had to use Google Maps, since that’s what he works on every day, and he had mentioned in conversation that he thought art inspired by Google Maps was cool (e.g., Christoph Niemann’s excellent work for his New York Times blog).
• Second, the map had to be small enough that I could sew all the city blocks before dying first, but big enough that all of the places important to the beginnings of our relationship could be mapped — places like the Duck and Bunny, where we had our second ever date; and the East Bay Bike Path, where we collected seaglass; and Loie Fuller’s, the most beautiful restaurant in Providence, the last place we ate together in Rhode Island before we left to begin the next chapter of our lives elsewhere. I decided to make it large enough for his full-size bed, and after some math, settled on the dimensions 54″ x 60″. I bought enough dark grey fabric (plain cotton) for this size, plus about 50% more for mistakes. But how to sew the map?

(Click through for full post.)

In Photoshop, I pieced together screenshots of Providence from Google Maps, editing the colors and upping the contrast to be more readable. I measured a grid of fifteen rectangles with a ratio of 2:3. It would be much easier to do this by sections, and after all, Google Maps is made of image tiles, too. I then copied out the fifteen individual sections and blew them up into 12″x18″ image files, like this:

Each section was named A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, etc. so I could keep track of what went where. As I finished each section, I would fill in its corresponding tile on my big grid to keep track of my progress. My laptop’s screen resolution is around 110ppi, so I made sure to make the resolution of each image that as well.

I cut fifteen rectangles from the grey fabric, about 16″x22″, and drew a 12″x18″ rectangle in the middle with a white pencil. Then I cranked up the brightness of my laptop screen so I could see the white lines of the image through the fabric. I aligned the edges of the fabric rectangle with the section image on my screen, zoomed at 100% so it would measure 12″x18″ in real life, and lightly traced the roads with the white pencil. I threaded my sewing machine with glow-in-the-dark thread ($6/spool), and outlined each city block, following the white lines I’d drawn. Each fabric “tile” of the quilt was labeled with A1, B2, etc. in the margins, and I also noted which direction was north to ensure accuracy.

I decided to only sew along the lines of city streets and the edges of the bay. I also outlined the capital building for kicks. Briefly, I considered putting Xs on important places or hand-embroidering the names of restaurants or sites, but I decided it would be better to leave the map blank and allow for the experience of figuring out together where certain places were.

It was faster to leave the blocks connected and just snip the threads afterward.

Here’s where things got tricky. I had fifteen sections of the map to piece together, and even though I was pretty accurate with my map tracings, the skinny lines of thread that ran over the rectangle boundary on each fabric section would not match up perfectly at the seams between sections. I tried at first, but they were off by up to half an inch when I sewed the tiles together — not a very good map at all. So I sewed all the blocks that were whole inside of the tile, and left any lines that went off the tile unsewn…

When I sewed the seams between sections, I also went over any unsewn lines and connected the blocks together across the seam. You can tell where I did this in the photos above and below, because I backed the thread up on itself a few times while sewing to secure it, leaving a thicker white line in some places.

Finally, the pieces were starting to come together. I could see the map! Best of all, when I turned off all of the lights at night, the thread was glowing brightly in the darkness, just like the streetlights of Providence as seen from the sky. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get a good photo of the threads glowing in the dark, so you will just have to imagine. The map, almost all sewn:

It was getting closer to Christmas at this point. This quilt took rather a long time, and I worked in spurts. At home, I bought batting and a soft black fabric for the back of the quilt. I also used this fabric for a 5″ frame around the map:

I loop-stitched swathes of batting together to the size I needed, since one roll wasn’t big enough to cover the whole quilt. Then I cut the black fabric to size to be the back of the quilt. (I also wrote a secret message along the border on the underside of the map! Willem is dying to know what it says.)

Then I sewed the sandwich of fabrics together, leaving about a foot unsewn…

…cut the corners so they wouldn’t be bulky…

…turned it inside out (well, outside-out), rolled the edges of the opening together, and sewed the last few inches with black thread. (Sorry for the bad photo. It looks like white thread but it’s just black thread caught in the flash.)

Whew, finished! I gave it a few test runs — wrapping it around myself as I watched TV or read a book, stretching out on it with my dog and taking a nap, etc. Seemed to get the job done. It was lightweight but warm, and the raised lines of the city blocks had a great texture. So I folded it lovingly, wrapped it in tissue paper and bubble wrap, tucked in a card, and sealed it in a box with a warning not to open with scissors or knives. I didn’t tell him what the map was of, since I knew he’d figure it out in a matter of seconds.

Willem called it his favorite present ever. I daresay he was pretty blown away. I was on the phone with him a few days later when he turned out his lights and yelled, “Wait. It GLOWS in the DARK?!” followed by amazed speechlessness. He sent me these photos of the quilt in his house:

(Full size photo.) Interestingly, this map is already historical. I ended up sewing a new section of the I-195 as well as the old road it replaced, which was recently knocked down. Future cartophiles will be able to assign a date to this map based on this!

I’m pretty pleased with how this came out. It took a long time to make and there were a lot of challenges, but it was fun to solve them, and even more fun to hear how much he liked it. I’d call it a success!

Once I have a good camera + lens, I’ll drop in on Willem someday and take some high-quality photos of the quilt. Meanwhile, if you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments, and I’ll do my best to answer them.

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