A journey from home to Arizona...

My husband has an interest in learning how the land ties together in this amazing and rugged area in which we live.  He loves the outdoors and enjoys discovering the passable routes through the desert and mountains in the back country by foot, horse, or bicycle.  He enjoys learning the history of the area and the old routes that were used by the pioneers and early settlers.

Dear Husband has decided his goal for 2019 is to travel, motor free, from our home in Utah to the Arizona line which is some 280 miles.  We live near the Old Spanish Trail, and the first 60 miles of this journey will be on or very near this historical route.  In order to make this goal happen from a logistics point of view, he needs my help.  He walked the first 10 miles alone and had our son drive out and get him.  Our son has gone back to college, so this trek goal has now become a team goal for us as a couple.

Because we both work, we are not able to take a bunch of time off to do it, so we will venture out on weekends and holidays.  The plan is to do it in sections.  We plan to walk and bike the whole way.  We have been out three days together on three separate weekends.  In addition to his first solo hike, we've hiked 22 miles together in three trips.

Since I am a devout quilt blogger, I have decided to share our journey online and make a quilt that will tell our story by mile.  I am going to do a Chevron Braid quilt, and here is the interpretation of it:

• Each log in the braid will represent a mile.  
• I will embroider dates and locations on those braids to further tell the story.  
• Alternating between black and white logs will represent the different days of our trip with an entire day being the same color.  I will use a variety of whites with black in them and blacks with white in them.
• The diamonds through the center of the braid will change colors to represent walking together, biking together, husband walking solo, and husband biking solo.  Those four colors will be orange, yellow, purple, and green.

I determined the colors entirely from rummaging through my stash.  It is so cool that I can make this journey quilt out of scraps.

I made this Chevron Braid quilt a few years back for my niece.  My Journey to Arizona quilt will be similar in that it will have 5 braided columns, but the braids will start at the top and go all the way down without the large diamonds in the middle.  The changes from black to white will represent a different day.  More miles in a day will have longer stretches of black or white, so my quilt will not be balanced like this one is.  The blue diamonds going through the center of my niece's quilt will be purple, orange, yellow, or green depending on how we traveled. 

I am super excited about this entire project and anxious to get our first 32 miles sewn in fabric before the next portion of our trek.

I want to close by saying that the quilt idea can partially be attributed to Mary who blogs at Needled Mom.  She made a temperature quilt last year with her sister to show how the temperature changed from day to day.  I loved the idea of telling a story with a quilt and decided to tell a different story with my non-motorized journey to Arizona.

I am linking up with:

Freemotion by the River (Connie)
Monday Making (Beth)
Esther's WOW