'Go Green' Challenge

I've used plants as inspiration for surprisingly few quilts given that I'm a botanist! The main exception was my 'Lady's Slipper Orchid' quilt from 2000 where I documented the stages in propagation that I'd carried out from seeds in the laboratory to plants back into the wild (there's only one plant left in the UK! ) I showed it to our conservation partners from English Nature (now Natural England) and I was delighted when they bought it for one of their boardrooms at head office - I've seen it a couple of times, now framed behind glass ,when I've been for meetings in Peterborough.

It even featured in 'Popular Patchwork' with a description of the silk painting enhanced by the large quilting stitches (if they thought that was large I dread to think what they'd think of the size of my stitching now)
Quilting Arts magazine have a 'Go Green ' 5inch square readers challenge using recycled materials which I'd thought vaguely of entering and collected a few items together. I thought I'd missed the deadline but gained extra materials this week as we had a massive clearout of old lab coats so looked at the article again and had a go. The extra inspiration was finding the ribbon with delegates badge for the '1st European Congress of Conservation Biology' I'd attended.

This is actually the one I'm NOT entering ( not sure of the etiquette of sharing images of quilts being submitted so erring on the side of caution). The main difference is the addition of a disposable scalpel ( without blade!) There's now a labcoat missing its pockets on one side. I used photo transfer paper to iron on images of the lab , plant/quilt and seeds , machined quilted, and then attached the embellishments. I made holes in the bottom of a Petri dish with a heated needle and stitched it on , the 'agar' is black wadding with beads for seeds and tufts of cotton perle as seedlings. I couched down some sterile inoculating loops, filter paper seed packets and filled some tiny vials with beads. And as a final touch, that 'Conservation' ribbon.

One savaged labcoat