WIP Wednesday - Evolution

I'm not sure what you guys are going to make of this one. 

The Irish Patchwork Society puts on a national exhibition every two years - this year the theme is evolution and it straight away prompted lots of ideas.  I can't tell you why I settled on these two to make, though it took a while to finalise the idea and choose fabric for the first of the 2 quilts I'm submitting.

I decided on some Kona solids in grey tones to make up the background of quilt #1.  Each line represents a million years and they get darker the further you go back in history.  The maximum size for the submission is 50" so, I bought a long quarter of each colour from the Limerick Quilt Centre and Fluffy Sheep Quilting and cut them to 6 3/4" wide.

Trying to get the gradient right was a little easier in black & white but I still think looking at the colour images, some of the greys are a little more blue than the others for a true gradient, but overall in this project I think it works ok.

I quilted the background by echoing the seam lines and quilting text into each of the the million year bands.  Using the latin names I added in as many as I could from our family tree - the Hominidae (the great apes!) I did mis-pell Homo heidelbergensis by leaving out the n - takes a lot of concentration quilt writing in latin!

My favouire latin name is Gorilla gorilla - very descriptive, not too keen on the Chimpanzee name Pan troglodytes but the Bonobo Pan paniscus sounds quite nice!  Pongo is the latin name for the Orangutan and for some reason I find that funny!

Working with black and navy meant lots of wadding fluff and my Ikea lint roller came in handy, by the time I was finished!


To represent our evolution, I used thin strips about 1" of this Lecien fabric bundle I got on Massdrop.  It has tiny scale so I wasn't losing the printed pattern even at 1" and it seemed to suit my theme.  Orange for Pongo, dark blue for Gorilla and pink for Pan!  For our side of the tree I used various colours of green to yellow right up to us with the red dot, with a tiny dancer in it, for you are here!

Our side is quite bitty with no long straight lines.  The fossil record shows lots of homins from Sahelanthropus, Ardipithecus, Australopithecus right up to Homo and some living at the same time, some interbreeding and lots of expansions out of Africa.    I learned a lot doing this - had no clue there were 2 species of Orangutan, quite a few of us have a small percentage of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA and there are a lot more Homo species that I imagined - was getting kind of crowded in the top left corner for a bit so I included what I could fit in!  This is a juried exhibition so fingers crossed this or the next one makes it in!

My second submission is called Same But Different!  I think its heavily influenced by the workshop I'm giving in June on Traditional Blocks Made Modern.  I took the Churn Dash and broke out the shapes it used for the top block.  Chunky churn dash for block #2, Nested one with a shoo-fly centre and lastly my version of a modern churn dash.

The idea being that evolution can move from the simple to the complex and bringing in a little bit of Darwin and natural selection, a mutation gives rise to the same animal but a little bit different.  The ones best fitted to the environment thrive and may lead to further mutations and so on!  I stopped at 4!

I really enjoyed block #4 so am going to write that one up as well to add to the class.  I am thinking of a bigger version as a stand alone baby quilt.  I think it could be really fun with the right fabrics in a 40" size".  Evolution of ideas!

So here's a little look of my take on evolution in quilt form.  If they get in, the exhibition will run in July so I'll get some finished shots for you.  For now it's onto hanging sleeves and labels!