300 miles, twenty times a year

This week's contest theme was "highways and byways." We recently moved up to northern California, where my husband and I both grew up, after having lived in southern California for around ten years. What with visiting family, we drove up and down the state about eight to ten times per year for all that time, so we've become very familiar with the signs you can see on that route. This design is a tribute to my favorite signs, and the four major north-south routes in general (1, 5, 99 and 101). Once, when we had to make last-minute change to a weekend trip, we ended up driving on all four in the course of a single day.



I've long had an idea of making a faux-applique cheater quilt using these motifs (as in, making it look like all the signs and lettering have been pieced out of other prints), so it was fun to be able to do a relatively quick and simplified iteration of that. I like how the little roads and intersections between the signs turned out. I also feel like the repeat came out pretty well, even with all those big blocks of color that can be hard to balance.

This came in 63 out of 146 with 105 votes. Traffic signs were obviously a major theme, and my favorite besides mine was this one that tweaked the color scheme to be a bit more feminine. There were also many entries formatted as a stylized landscape, of which I liked this mountainous take and this diagrammatic display of landmarks (which came in fourth). In the realm of slightly less representational entries, I really liked these rolling hills, gridded roads on the bias, and most abstract of all, the nicely textured loops.