Way Up North Where the Kittiwakes Play by Juli-Ann Gasper

Every year we took a 3 to 4 week driving/camping vacation to a national park to learn about the area’s geology, flora and fauna, and culture. We hiked in the forests and canyons and played in the streams. My husband and I were adult chaperones on two 50-miler backpack treks with my parents’ Boy Scout and Girl Scout troops. My teaching career spanned 32 years at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. Besides keeping up to date on advances in the subject matter, I took on the challenge of always staying ahead of the students with respect to learning technology skills. I was the first professor at Creighton who had a web page to serve up information for the class. I remember the day I first inserted a YouTube video into a PowerPoint lecture. The astonishment on students’ faces was accompanied by “How did you do that, Dr. Gasper?” My teaching also included 4 semesters teaching in the Dominican Republic and a research trip in Costa Rica to study women’s cooperative businesses. I create pieces that are small enough for me to afford the framing (we all know how much it costs to frame something). The technique I developed is called layered cutaway. I stack up to 10 pieces of fabric, stitch through them, cut away the top layer judiciously, stitch another pattern, cut away another layer, etc. The result is a 3-dimensional creation. I’ve sold over 200 art pieces in the last 2 decades. Most of the pieces are landscapes, animals, and plants that I have discovered in our explorations. Several were inspired by the trip to the Arctic north on which this book is based.