Macondo in Stitches

As I read One Hundred Years of Solitude, I couldn't shake the imagery from my head -- the yellow flowers falling from the sky, the butterflies tormenting a doomed lover, the ash crosses marking the 17 Aurelianos.  I wanted some way to record and play with the motifs and icons from the text.

I've started with a grid of 100 squares, inchies really, that I can play with:

Beadboy3 wants to stitch, too

I used white broadcloth from one of Mr. Beadgirl's old shirts, and machine-stitched a ten by ten grid with black thread, rather carelessly on purpose to keep the lines and angles from being too perfect.  I like how the black lines on white fabric evoke the black type on white pages of the text itself.

The first square is one of Colonel Aureliano Buendia's gold fish, which he makes when he is not leading rebellions and slaughtering his enemies.

I made mine with sequins and different gold threads, with a black bead for his eye.

I don't intend to fill every square, and this will be an on-going project that I work on as inspiration strikes.