Travel (Child's Crib Quilt)

In the foreground of this pictorial quilt, a young girl sits on a grassy hillside reading a book. The cover bears the initials RLS, which refer to the poet Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote the stanza embroidered in the sky above the landscape. The stanza is from the poem "Travel," which appeared in Stevenson's 1885 collection A Child's Garden of Verses. The embroidered stanza reads:
I should like to rise and go
Where the golden apples grow
Where in sunshine reaching out
Eastern cities miles about
Are with mosque and minaret
Among sandy gardens set.
Stevenson's poem invites the young reader to imagine places—as does the quilt, with its depiction of a city in the distance.
—Making Memories: Quilts as Souvenirs, October 20, 2017-April 1, 2018