Jamie and our Cabin in the Woods

This is the first of my own projects which I completed just before I got married.
At this time the world and the future was a bit of an unknown, but my husband Jamie and I had pretty fixed ideas about where we eventually wanted to end up - a cabin in the woods, near a river.

Rivers were a significant feature of our life together up to that point, normally charging down Californian ones in rubber rafts, but we loved the quiet ones too and always escaped from the craziness of whitewater raft guiding to quiet wee cabins on the Yuba in Northern California.

I made this for him just before our wedding and before we travelled and lived in Thailand, India and finally New Zealand.

This was my first attempt at creating some kind of perspective, and it almost worked. Weaving the river in behind the trees helped- I tried to use different thicknesses of thread to help create perspective, but the difference is too great in the tree on the right and it looks a bit like a jelly mould pudding. But Jamie likes desserts too, so I thought that would be ok. In fact given his sweet tooth maybe I should have called it a Hansel and Gretel house, with ice cream bushes and a roof of flapjacks.

So this was a mini, 2D version of our dream to remind us of where we were trying to get to, and the most realistic version we could hope for at the time.

I unpacked this picture in New Zealand, I'd completely forgotten about it, and realised that the house we'd just bought in Wellington looked remarkably similar. Which just shows you, dreams do come true.