I'm feeling marine green these days, still watching otters at the Monterey Bay Aquarium otter camera and thinking about the importance of kelp to our oceans and earth. Previous kelp-and-otter-related quilts are here and here. My challenge this time was to create an abstract kelp quilt that felt textural; whether that meant threads showing or raw edges or hand sewing, I wasn't sure when I started. Text and texture came together in strong verticals with tiny splashes of color to move the eye around.
Kelp Kelp Garibaldi
29.5 x 45.5" (75 cm x 115.5 cm)
Hand-dyed cotton, velvet, flannel; Japanese yarn-dyed cotton; letterpress printing from wood type on cotton; raw-edge piecing; sashiko-style quilting with "rising steam" and "fish scale" patterns; beads; cotton thread
Continuing my creative exploration of kelp and otters, I chose some wood type letters that felt like the right shapes for kelp and letterpress printed and overprinted them onto cotton in light green, medium green, and dark green.
The texture was created by piecing the strips back to back and ironing the seams over one way or other. Garibaldi is California's state marine fish; it is vibrant orange with a heart-shaped tail and lives among the kelp.
Quilting is by hand in the sashiko-style "rising steam" pattern and a little of the "fish scale" pattern for the garibaldi.
I used some of my Spoonflower Everbird shop "otter dreams" designs, one I had had printed just black outlines on white cotton so I could overdye it. The other has a kelp green background. All of the colors otherwise are hand dyed cotton, velvet, and flannel.
Another is in the works.
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But I also decided to sign up for NaNoWriMo again this year, which means I will be writing 2-3 hours a day for the month of November.
I only participated once before, in 2019, and blogged about it in detail here, which turned out to refresh my memory on how to go about it again: Getting Ready for NaNoWriMo, and Week 1, and Week 2, and Week 3, and Week 4, and More Than a Blank Page: (Learning from NaNoWriMo).
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