June / July '18 Lite Challenge: Journeys of a Cheese Girl

[jbgibson]

Been mulling this over for a couple of weeks... finally had a spare couple of hours.

Real journey, real person - the blog is at

https://journeysofacheesegirl.wordpress.com

The blog is a fun read - the TL;DR of it is a young lady at Middlebury College, Vermont, USA gets fellowship to research local cheesemaking around the world. She spends over a year traveling, centered on seven nations in four continents.

Now, knowing the strong feelings (both pro & con :-) ) at the Guild on the subject of cheese and cheesy jokes -- this is absolutely an absolutely ideal journey to map. Then, upon many milliseconds of thought, I asked "why not do the MAP ITSELF in cheese?" I can report it is an easy medium to work with, albeit low-resolution. I first pictured a layer of continent outlines in one color cheese, atop a 'sea' of another color. Then I thought of inlaying the land color into the sea color. Fortunately once I practiced cutting, I concluded the inlay idea would be madness, and further, that trying to cut outlines then place them atop another layer of flat cheese-sea would be tough to get aligned. So I just went with land outlines on an aluminum cookie sheet.

I had to stick with fairly chunky outlines, so I printed a rough world map.
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Then I started cutting away seas. The way one would do this as inlay work with wood veneer would be super sharp knives cutting through both layers and the template at once. Somehow I knew cheddar would not stand up to that treatment.
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[jbgibson]

Then to - shall we say - nibble away at the blank cheese world until recognizable (If you squint. A lot.) landmasses appear.
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The cheese slightly sticks to the cookie sheet substrate; that's a lot of help. Mind you, Madagascar and New Zealand tend to wander. I had thought to make the Caribbean and Indonesian/Philippine islands of crumbs of cheese... which started to look like a LOT of work, and worse - too much time. I realized I had a limited amount of time before the cheese warmed up to a greasy, soft mess.

[jbgibson]

Nibble, nibble.
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[jbgibson]

After practicing off-camera with pins in cheese, I realized another layer beneath as the seas would have been good - straight pins do not like to stand up in under 1mm-thick cheddar. Each nation Linnea Burnham visited was a headquarters for various amounts of travelling about - "Norway" for instance involved Norway, Finland, and Sweden. It would look cool to have a little tangle of the journey-thread orbiting about each main destination pin. It would.... if I could trust even more pins to not destroy my cheddar, and my thread knotwork to not likewise stress things overmuch. Cheese: easy to cut, easy to tear. After many milliseconds of design angst, I resolved to be content with single locations per desti-nation. Too, she took a path that in schematic doubled back and overlaid itself... even nice tight straight lines would look tangled. Maybe curvy inexact looping thread would actually be better visible as a travel track... laziness triumphs. All the to-and-fro has to be schematic anyway since I have no idea what her intermediate stops were. I doubt there's many direct flights between São Paulo and Ulanbataar....

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Her itinerary included
Thetford/ Middlebury, Vermont, USA
June-August 2015: Oslo/ Valdres/ Hokksund/ Lesja/ Undredal/ Aurland/ Alta/ Karasjok, Norway
Umea/ Burträsk, Sweden
Rovaniemi, Finland
September-November 2015: Bra, Italy
December 2015: Gloucester/ Birmingham, England
January-February 2016: Cape Town, South Africa
March 2016: Araxá/ São Paulo/ Canastra, Brazil
April-May 2016: Ulaanbataar, Mongolia
June-July 2016: Gruyères/ Bulle, Switzerland
back to Vermont

...and no doubt many other places not mentioned in the blog. The order of cities is arbitrary - I only know the order of the nations.

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I suppose to be a proper map - even one based on cheese - one ought to have at a minimum a title. I'll do that much digitally. I shan't indicate the edges of the world since I can't tell what projection the original was - something like a Robinson or Eckert at a guess, based on the slant of New Zealand and Alaska.

I guess I'll put the original in the fridge overnight, and think about disconnecting Baffin/etc, Japan, Indonesia, The Philippines, Tierra del Fuego and other islands. I'll want to label the final; this 'un or a mild geographic improvement. I won't accept mocking based on the blobbiness; It Is After All ... CHEESE.

[Bogie]

That's amazing, but now can you do it as a globe?

[jbgibson]

Not by midnight tonight :-).

Now, Edam cheese starts out as pretty much a sphere; I wonder...

[jbgibson]

And final one - label the pins.
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[jbgibson]

Version with a bit of title/ labelling:

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[Bogie]

This is so Cheesy!!

Actually it turned out great. I am amazed at how good an aluminum cookie sheet works as a "grunge background " ocean.