Cliffs of Moher – some background
On Sunday I finished my Cliffs of Moher needle felt piece. I’ll show it to you in a bit, but first I wanted to give you some background on the Cliffs of Moher and what they mean to me. As I believe I’ve mentioned previously in this blog, AwesomeE and I have known each other since we were 2 years old, and that our families are close friends. That’s basically as long as we can remember. For most of our lives, we’ve considered ourselves best friends, even when our families lived in different cities and we only saw each other a few times a year. But some of those times were holiday weekends together at AwesomeE’s grandmother’s house, so they counted for a lot.
We even went to the same college, and our first two years there stayed fast friends. In the last couple years though we drifted apart and our friendship was rather more tenuous, for a variety of reasons. Some because we were stupid young adults who did/said stupid things, and some because as young adults I suspect we needed some time to figure ourselves out without the weight of a nearly two decades long friendship.
Post college, I was accepted as an English Teaching Assistant in Normandy, France. When I left in September, my dad told me that he wouldn’t be able to fly me home for Christmas, so I should expect that I would be on my own. One great thing about the teaching assistantship was that I typically had a 12-15hr work week (and was paid accordingly), so I had LOADS of time to keep in touch with people. And VOIP had just arrived on the scene – for a mere 7euro/month on top of my internet bill I had unlimited calls to the US. I have NEVER been so good at maintaining communications with people since – I was going to get my 7euro worth! And of course, various chat programs were readily available. AwesomeE and I reconnected, and somewhere in early November we decided to go to Ireland together.
Stuck together in the confines of buses, trains, and little hostel rooms for two weeks, doing everything together? This could go one of two ways: amazingly awesome or total disaster. We started on arrangements – plane tickets, expedited passport (AwesomeE), list of things we wanted (and could) see using just public transport and our own legs. The day after we put our plans in motion my dad called to say he could fly me home for Christmas. Upon which I informed him he was too late, and he’d better tell E’s parents she wasn’t coming home for Christmas either. We did make sure to call on Christmas morning, at the early hour of 10am GMT (5am EST), a little reminder of the days when we were small children waking our parents up first thing to see if Santa had come. In hindsight, this was likely a bigger reminder that we were still obnoxious brats.
As you can probably guess, our trip was not a disaster, since we are still best friends. We had a fantastic time making our way around Ireland, staying in a variety of hostels, and occasionally getting absolutely soaked by cold winter rains. We knew that most places would shut down over Christmas, so E found a lovely hostel (peat fire AND free Christmas dinner – this was a surprise and much nicer than the canned marinara and pasta we’d planned for ourselves) in Doolin near the Cliffs of Moher for Christmas Eve through Boxing Day. On Boxing Day the hostel owners kindly offered to drive us out to the Cliffs, and we’d just have to walk back. They are spectacular. Because the coast line is jagged, you can stand on one cliff top and look over to see another line of cliffs jutting out into the ocean. Our host dropped us near O’Brien’s Tower, where the cliffs reach their highest point of 702ft (214m) above the sea.
Our trip to the cliffs finished up with a leisurely walk back through the Irish countryside along narrow roads, and with another peat fire in the hostel to warm ourselves up.
Finishing my Needle Felt
I last worked on the piece in early January, and made some decent progress on the cliffs, and in filling in the foreground some more.
But I also got a little stuck, largely with the main cliff and the one right behind it. I just wasn’t able to get it to match the photograph. So I let it sit for a while and worked on the stream piece instead.
I have not bought any yarn yet this year (which I couldn’t say this time last year), but I did get some new roving colors for my needle felting. A couple where colors I felt I just needed to fill gaps, and others I bought specifically with the stream piece I’m working on in mind. But I also found a couple helpful in finalizing my Cliffs of Moher:
The new colors helped a fair bit – the olive green could mix with the lime to get the vivid but still complex greens of the cliffs. The beige with a bit of mauve also made for much nicer highlights on the cliffs where the whites and greys I had were too harsh.
But the other thing that really helped me finish it was when I stopped looking at the source photograph. It was tripping me up because I was trying to match the photo too much, and missing the essence of the image. I needed to give myself more space to remember what it felt like to be there*, and to play a bit more with the colors to highlight the sense of wonder and magic of seeing the high cliffs and hearing the waves below.
AwesomeE gave her approval, so I think I did alright.
*I did not try to capture the heart-stopping anxiety of watching parents climb over the safety rails to walk with their children along the crumbling cliff edges.