The Long Way Home Spread

The latest Documented Life Project 2015 challenge hit a bit too close to home (pun definitely intended!) for complete comfort as far as I was concerned. We are sticking with our travel journalling theme for June. The art challenge however was: home town inspiration and the journalling prompt: There is no place like home. For me and many migrants that raises the question: Where is home?

I was born in the place circled above but my parents moved from there when I was 11. Had they stayed I have the strong suspicion I would still be there although, of course, we will never know that for sure. It took a lot of years and many more moves including several international ones before I came to the realization that we carry our home inside our heart so home is always with us. Wherever we go we have ourselves inside us, we are always at home with us. And it is only when we come to terms with who we are, that we are truly home not just within ourselves but wherever we happen to find ourselves. It helps when you find yourself there with a deeply loved fellow human and two adored canines! I  sometimes find it almost impossible to imagine that once I used to live somewhere else entirely. Home is not a place, it's a state of mind.

My hoarding habit came in very handy this week as I have a large box with images cut or torn from a wide variety of magazines, including several Dutch ones. And this image of the province of The Netherlands in which I was born was one of them together with the Dutch texts and the image of skating people and a windmill (don't be deceived into thinking I love skating. I don't! with a vengeance). The spread was started in the normal way. I used colours that are sort of related to the Documented Life spread I made last week (see it here) but added more brighter colours. I used 3 different stencils from the Stencilgirl Club: one from the Oct. 2014, one from August 2014 and one from February 2015. Then the images and texts were glued on with matte medium and outlined with black and white markers.

The text The Long Way Home was inspired by one of the Inspector Gamache novels by Louise Penny. I recently made a quilt too with the same name.

The hunt was then on for suitable postage stamps to add. They had to be Dutch of course, and ideally I would have wanted to find one with the year I left the country but that wasn't to be. I did however find one that represented the province Limburg as you can see above. As shown this province is not just Dutch. There is also a province called Limburg in Belgium. Needless to say there were once one!

So there it is. My tribute to the place I was born, and thanks are owed to The Documented Life Project for briefly transporting me back there.