This year I have been reading quite a bit of marine biology and oceanic nonfiction, from [Amazon links] Rachel Carson's The Edge of the Sea to Carl Safina's Voyage of the Turtle, and all things ocean have been on my mind. I've made sea turtle quilts, kelp quilts, and more.
It was time for sea stars, which I didn't realize until an idle drawing in my journal gave me an idea. Based on the drawing, I drew and cut out a large stencil, then stenciled in gold for the quilt Asteroidea, which is the class name for starfish (not a fish) otherwise known as sea stars. Underneath the top layer I pinned together both some cotton I had tea-dyed and one piece of tea-dyed velvet. I stitched around and cut out the center of the stars for reverse applique and machine quilted the rest. Then I beaded.
With doublestick tape, I arranged the cutout stars, point to point in a sphere: eighteen in all, a number I like to work with, the auspicious number equaling "life" in Hebrew. Since one variety of sea star is bright orange and I previously happened to have made an orange-pigmented piece of linen, I used that for the base layer. I splattered watered-down acrylic inks until I had covered the stars. Then I let the cloth dry and removed the stars.
I'm interested in the spaces between the stars, what they form, and so I added iridescent sequins there to highlight a circular space and again add texture.
Detail:
Safina's turtle book took him (and me) deeper than just biological study. He went out on boats with fisherpeople, swordfisherpeople, sailed to remote islands, traveled with marine biologists studying the deep ocean and more. He pointed out that if you promote conservation, there are complex circumstances to consider. You must address poverty before you can convince a population to save turtles, the ocean, or anything else. Some of the fishermen made a good living supporting their families and had no other skills. What would they do if they didn't fish? A remote island may have only the turtles as a resource: they can get plenty of eggs, sell adult shells, eat or sell the meat until they can't, because with no eggs, eventually there won't be any more turtles.
So when we feel the pull of wanting to keep animals and oceans and earth safe and habitable we have to consider what we can offer people who have no choice but to take advantage of the (perhaps temporary) available resources. We need to suggest solutions or mitigations, such as the curved hooks for long lines and the turtle escape hatches in shrimp nets that Safina mentions, both of which reduce the harming and killing of turtles, among others. Conservation and poverty are linked. Compassion, research, education and training are key. Voyage of the Turtle is a wonderful, eyeopening book; Carl Safina doesn't just impart information, he tells stories. His writing is thoughtful, insightful, and he seems to love lyrical wordplay as well. It is no wonder he has won so many awards.
With Collective Good the sea stars are densely connected. The quilting around them is the sashiko "fishing nets" pattern, the humanmade, the opposite of the living being in the center. We have to hold both ideas in our hands in order to save everything dear for the collective good.
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