Hello friends, today is the 10th of December and twenty years ago Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring premiered in London, so I decided to join my love of Tolkien with my love for embroidery and recreate the map of Middle Earth. (I’m too scared to iron it incase I burn it!)

I was about 11 when it premiered in London and I had just finished reading the books – I had borrowed an amazing leather bound copy that had all three books in one, I distinctly remember that the kids in my class thought I was weird for reading the Bible! My mum took me to see Fellowship soooo many times and we regularly have LotR marathons. It isn’t just the amazing story, I have a deep love for Howard Shore’s soundtrack and scenery and landscape of New Zealand. Prof Tolkien was and still is a genius!

I often think Middle Earth is my happy place, so a project like this has been really enjoyable. In the end I turned it into a wall hanging. The map is sewn using one strand of black cotton thread and took about six weeks to finish. I started by drawing a copy of the map onto the correct sized paper for scale and then very faintly redrew it onto an appropriate sized piece of cotton before sewing it a little at a time. The trees took quite awhile but were so much fun!

Although I love both the books and the movies I know that the LOTR movies were hated by a large portion of book fans when it was first released for deviating too far from the source material. But you need to change things that just wouldn’t work on camera, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books (another of my favourites) haven’t faired too well when translated onto the screen – there’s just some things that work best in imagination or on paper.

Either way Middle Earth is a wonderfully immersive place to be and a lot of the art that I do for fun is Tolkien related.