I’ve chosen the images below as examples of how the linear shapes of landscapes and provide me with the structure, or inspiration if you like, to compose pieced and stitched designs in fabric and thread. Many of them have words like landlines, landmarks, tidelines and dreamlines in their titles and statements.

In this favourite beach photo, I edited out a footprint, making the scale quite ambiguous, reminding us that whatever the scale, whether in a vast desert or along the margin of your local beach, such a pattern is formed in the process of erosion.

There are a couple of different land lines in this picture: first are what I call the beach cliffs which I’ve only seen occur 1m or 2m up the beach from the water’s edge a couple of times. In the lower part of the photo, the fine lines wandering down to the bottom of the photo ending with a little lump were ridges of wet sand left by tiny bivalves gradually following the receeding tide as it moved further away from the ‘beach cliffs’.

I used the photo to (1) draw basic lines of the beach cliffs and the pattern left by the little molluscs, and (2) used them to cut and piece a sample of improvisational or freehand patchwork to show students in a class how easy it is to work this way if one wishes, and that there is plenty of potential in original fibreart based on personal observations remembered, drawn or photographed.

In my advanced improvisational patchwork construction workshops, a power point presentation includes some other examples of how we can use patterns observed in nature.

I’ve written elsewhere about machine stitched lines and segments of fabric, and how they inspired me to come up with this almost-railway-tracks pattern.

This is a section of a new piece I’m currently working on in very deserty colours, using the same combination of machine and hand stitching with segmented patchwork that I developed and used in my donation to this year’s SAQA Benefit Auction quilt. The combination of lines and colours suggested strands of green algae, so I called it Spirogyra.