Kraken

Here it is, the completed octopus quilt!

The quilting, which I'm quite happy with, shows up really well on the back.

The backing matches the narrow outer border on the front.

Here are a couple more closeups. Hooray for another quilt completed!

Did you know that the largest octopus on record weighed over 150 pounds? Octopi are very intelligent too, so this would probably be a good quilt to study under.

Hydrothermal Vent Worm Plushie

I'm afraid I don't have a particularly good picture of this project, but I made this plush hydrothermal vent worm for a fellow marine scientist as a graduation gift several years ago.

I already talked about hydrothermal vent worms here. Or you could just read Wikipedia.

The pattern is my own. I wish I could find it again, because I keep thinking I should make them to sell on Etsy or something like that. Fortunately, these guys have a pretty simple shape!

Marine Snow

One of the quilts which I entered into the recent quilt show and which I haven't posted about here yet is called "Marine Snow." I also just entered it in a Weekly Themed Quilt Contest here (you can go vote if you'd like to!). I made it as a birthday gift for my fiance, who does research on marine snow. Marine snow is--in his words, the technical terms of a prominent researcher on the subject--"dead crud that sinks."

Here it is hanging in the quilt show.

More specifically, marine snow consists of dead algae, small plants, poop, and other detritus that clumps together and slowly sinks. (I just realized I made a quilt about poop. That's got to be a new low in quiltmaking...) It's called marine snow because it looks a lot like snow (sorry that video is a bit jargon-y, but it has a nice shot of the stuff at the beginning). The reason marine snow is interesting to scientists is that there is a lot of carbon in it, and when carbon sinks to the deep ocean it stays there for a long time. Carbon, as I'm sure you know, is important as a greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. It moves between the atmosphere and the ocean, and so if a lot of carbon sinks to the deep ocean that means it's not in the atmosphere contributing to the greenhouse effect.

I quilted it with long meandering vertical lines, which are supposed to represent the paths the particles take as they sink, although if you look at them horizontally they could also be waves in the ocean!

This quilt is the "Confetti" pattern from the book StrataVarious Quilts by Barbara Persing and Mary Hoover. His favorite color is teal, so I kept that from the original pattern and just switched out the colors of the "confetti" pieces. I'm really pleased with the way it turned out, although it was a pretty labor-intensive pattern and wasted a lot of fabric (something I am not a big fan of!). And he seems to be pretty happy with it, too!

The Other 71%

This past week, I had the fabulous opportunity to have lunch with my namesake, the amazing and inspiring Sylvia Earle. Since I've been spending most of my crafty time getting my quilts ready for the upcoming quilt show (sewing on hanging sleeves and labels--what fun!), I thought I'd share with you the second quilt I made, which was inspired by all the neat stuff in the ocean, and which will be going in the show.

I thought the "watercolor" table runner in the first quilt book I bought was a cool idea, but have never been a big fan of florals. However, I was finding lots of fun aquatic-themed quilt fabric and decided that I'd use this technique to make a marine science themed quilt, since that's my field.

I tried to put in as many nerdy details as I could.

A bacterium quilt square

A jellyfish and a machine-appliquéd deep-sea anglerfish 

My very favorite part of the quilt are the hydrothermal vent worms.

Hydrothermal vents are totally awesome. Basically, they're jets of hot water (and by hot, I mean 600+ degrees F--it doesn't boil because the pressure is so great) in the freezing depths of the ocean. Most of the ocean floor is actually pretty much a wasteland--but in these places, there is an amazing variety of life, the most striking of which are hydrothermal vent worms. What's so cool about them is that sunlight doesn't penetrate the ocean to those depths (the vents can be up to three miles under the surface of the ocean), and until they were discovered in the 1970s no one had any idea it was even possible for life to exist without sunlight.

Some more pictures:

The white at the top left represents the ice caps.

There's that bacterium at the upper right. Many of the other fabrics in the quilt remind me of things like tiny algae, seaweed, and different kinds of bacteria.

This is the deep-ocean part of the quilt. There's a giant squid at the top left. Lots of animals in the deep ocean are red, hence all the red here.

Here you can see the seafloor. There's kelp and corals at the top left (OK, a bit of a juxtaposition there, but I had to fit everything in somehow!), and lots of sea life around them!

I quilted the majority of the quilt with a wave pattern, but around the edges I used blue and red sparkly thread to portray the thermohaline circulation.

The thermohaline circulation is the large-scale circulation of the oceans. "Thermo" of course means heat, and "haline" means salty because the temperature and the salt content of the water are what drive it (yes, the ocean is saltier in some places than in others!). Basically, cold salty water (sparkly blue thread) is denser than warm not-as-salty (sparkly red thread) water, so you end up with water from the surface of the ocean sinking down to the depths near the poles. That allows warm water from near the equator to flow in to fill its place--you know it as the Gulf Stream, and it keeps places like England habitable.

The title of the quilt comes from the fact only 29% of the Earth's surface is land, but we often forget about the other 71%, which is a pretty cool place.