Mapping out stitches

I am crazy for this work in progress by Marta Brysha of Silk and Color. It’s gorgeously textural–a thing of beauty even if you know nothing of the backstory. But consider this: She says,

My source image is a satellite photograph of the Turpan Depression, a mountainous region spanning from Tadjikistan to China.  The image inspired me because of the fabulous textures and contrasts.

Her plan is to cover this entire surface in stitch. She is using fabrics and threads that she has hand-dyed to match the source image. The stitches she has chosen are exquisitely, innately topographical. Go to her blog post for images you can click to enlarge (including an extreme closeup of her Palestrina-stitch mountain ridges). And be sure to watch her blog regularly to see this work emerge.