Spanish Translation

Not often I post about work related stuff but couldn't resist showing you the recently published Spanish translation of my 'Growing Orchids from Seeds' book. You can even peek inside here.
Could have done with this all those years ago when I ran a training course in Mexico but I'm sure it will prove useful for Darwin Project OSSSU.

'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