Baby Quilt

Maybe I'll ask RJH to take some better photos, but I wanted to share the baby quilt. It's hexagons (broken into trapezoids... commonly known as tumbling blocks) in yellows, purples, grays, turquoise & teals. The front features hexagons with some of my animal linocuts including the raccoon, owl, butterflies, panda family, seahorse, nautilus, and the baby tapir - as well as some patterns like clouds and feathers. The reverse is the entire alphabet of linocut animal monograms, with sashing, and a pieced border of scraps from the front.

Finishing the alphabet

with y for yak and z for zebra. I considered making y for yeti, to go with the mermaid and unicorn, but frankly, the sketch was too scary for a baby quilt (my ulterior motive for printing these monograms).

I've now completed the back and affixed the front, batting and back of the quilt. I still have to quilt it together, but the baby quilt should be finished soon too!

Nearing the end of the alphabet

These letters are all available in at least 5 colours or patterns. Each sheet is only 14.8 cm or 5⅞ inches square.


S is for snail


R is for rooster


W is for (humpback) whale


V is for (turkey) vulture


X is for Xenopus, the African clawed frog or platanna


Only two letters left to go: Y and Z. I'm almost finished my quilt too. I went and bought the batting and fabric I needed so I really want to complete the alphabet and the quilt both.

Today, however, I must go bake a birthday cake for my father.

Hope you're enjoying your weekend!

more letters

I've also been working away at the alphabet of monograms. Just R,S, V, W, X, Y, and Z left! I've made h for hippo, k for koala and p for parrot.

g for giraffe

G is for Giraffe of course!

This 'g' monogram linocut features an elegant giraffe. It's standing on the tail and peeking through the loop of the 'g'. This is an open edition print in brown ink on Japanese paper, known as washi. It is available in a variety of colours! Each sheet is 14.8 cm or 5⅞ inches square.

Q for Quail

I'm working on a baby quilt (of course). I've actually finished the quilt top, but I decided for the back, it would be great to include my block printed, illustrated letters on fabric. I've now made 14 letters, so I still have 12 to carve, but I should still have plenty of time to finish, I hope. Here's my latest: Q for Quail. I love how the top feather on a California quail sort of mimics the tail of a q. I used to see bustling little quail families regularly when I lived on Vancouver Island. They always struct me as having funny personalities; they managed to seem a wee bit pompous yet bumbling.









These are open edition, printed on various Japanese papers, 14.8 cm or 5⅞ inches square.

L is for Lynx

This 'L' monogram linocut features a lynx. This is an open edition print on Japanese kozo washi (or mulberry paper), Thai and other interesting papers. It is available in a variety of colours and some prints! Each sheet is 5.5 inches by 8 inches, or 14 cm by 21.6 cm.

The lynx can be one of four types of wildcat. This one is a Eurasian lynx native to European and Siberian forests. I've been a fan of the lynx since childhood. I recall writing a report on the subject in grade 4. In fact, I might have found said project in my mother's storage locker earlier this month (not to say I'm a complete pack-rat... but, this might have happened).



Also, a little aside. Some of you, like me, are fans of printmaking and appreciate the work involved in making a hand pulled print. Etsy recently reorganized its front page in an effort to facilitate browsing. The trouble is that Printmaking, formerly an obvious category, is now stuck in a subsection of Art labelled 'Prints and Posters'. Unfortunately, many people use the word 'print' to signify a reproduction. There's nothing wrong with reproductions - I have some giclée and archival prints which I enjoy. But they are entirely different from original artworks made labouriously by hand by printmakers, like relief prints, etchings, sérigraphs, lithographs, collographs, woodcuts, engravings and more. If you are an Etsy user, please add your two cents worth here. It's important that they hear that this is not a move which serves artists or art buyers. It might be particularly meaningful for them to receive feedback from buyers.

Reading is sexy XXXII

{image: The sorceress (1911) by John William Waterhouse (Rome 1849-London 1917) via Guarda chi legge}
7. Ingenious Pursuits by Lisa Jardine Following reading Jardine's biographies of both Christopher Wren (accidental architect/astronomer/anatomist/mathematician/occasional surgeon/man about town) and Robert Hooke (engineer/architect/microscopist/inventor/surveyor/secretary to the royal society/astronomer/botanist/unfortunate self-medicator and coffee enthusiast) I read her story of the birth of modern science. It is a well written, clear concise and beautifully-illustrated book detailing astronomy, microcopy, anatomy, the early pursuit of clockworks to solve the longitude problem, the collection of exotic specimens and wunderkammer, the birth of the peer-review with an epilogue on the discovery of DNA's double-helix. Disclaimer: Now, if you're like me, you are ill-equipped to read about the earliest discoveries of William Harvey about blood circulation and worse - those who tried to verify his claims through vivisection. I did enjoy learning more about a variety of scientists and enthusiastic supporters. I will also re-iterate my one frustration: scientists sometimes make loosy historians of science, because they can lack context or create hagiographies, conversely, my issue with this fascinating 'anthropology of scientists' created by Jardine is the lack of scientific context. Yes, I am interested in reading about Hooke and Christiaan Huygens battling it out over their respective attempts to claim priority for spring watches, however, insufficient technical detail is provided here to allow the reader to form an informed opinion on the issue! When Hooke claims priority over Newton for the inverse-square law form for the force of gravity, can this be substantiated? Was Oldenburg a spy? She points out that Newton himself erroneously dismissed astronomer-royal Flamsteed's ideas about periodicity in comet orbits by saying they follow straight line at a time that Hooke and Wren were discussing inverse-square laws for gravity, but she does not go that (to a physicist) obvious next step, to discuss who knew what when!

Also, I ♥ Edmond Halley. He should be the next topic of any scientific biography! Without Halley, all these prickly scientists would have not functioned. Not only was he a sea captain/astronomer/geophysicist/adventurer/gentleman and discoverer of the periodicity of his comet. He was the one who managed to pry data away from Flamsteed and the Principia Mathematica away from Newton! Poor man was repaid for many of his efforts on behalf of the Royal Society with 50 copies of Willoughby*'s A History of Fishes.

Also, the minimal sketches of a few interesting female astronomers left me wanting to read more.

8. One Letter Words - a Dictionary by Craig Conley Somehow, I became someone who reads dictionaries. The idea behind this one is intriguing (well, to me at least), and the definitions are illustrated with quotations from literature (some, sadly repeated). As the author points out, most people respond by saying there are only two or three one-letter words (the obvious ones: 'a', 'I' and maybe 'O'). However, if you put a little thought into it, you remember there are a large number of vitamins, musical notes, base pairs in our genetic sequence, personality types, Roman numerals and other things which are labelled with single letters. Then, of course, there are shapes (A-frame, f stop, j stroke, T-shirt, and so forth). Each and every letter can be used to signify a piece of type or a key for that letter. There are also numbers (c is the speed of light, e is the base of natural logorithms, h is Planck's constant, i is the square root of -1, k can be Boltzmann's constant - though sensible people use a subscript 'B'). He also includes commonly used scientific symbols - and here is where he goes wrong! Because the only real justification for such a dictionary could be some sort of completeness -otherwise, why segregate the words based on length? And yet, here, off the top of my head are single letter word definitions he has omitted: a for acceleration, B for magnetic field (and yet he does include H for magnetic field!) or b for bottom quark - formerly known as beauty, C for capacitance or c for charm quark, d for displacement or down quark or D for Deuterium (which is particularly annoying because he repeatedly uses a literary quotation which erroneoulsy calls heavy water H2O2, which is wrong, rather than D2O), E for energy or Young's modulus, f for frequency, g for gluon, h for height, I for the identity matrix (and yet he defines several other matrices!?!), j for i (hahah! it's true though, we often use j to signify the square root of negative one to distinguish it from I for current), k for 1000 (and yet, he has it for 1024 in computer science) particularly for money (he does get the more colloquial G), L for luminosity or angular momemntum, m for meter (how can anyone miss the meter?) or mass, N for Newton, O for Orthonormal group, P for power, q for electric charge or Q for question (!), R for resistance, S for Siemens or s for strange quark, T for Tritium or Tesla or Tertiary (and yet he has K for Cretaceous!) or t for top quark - formerly known as truth, U for internal energy or potential energy or the up quark, v for velocity, W for work, x for Planet X or even The X files (as he certainly includes other proper nouns), y for the Bessel function, Z for the Z vector boson. It should NOT be this easy for me to brainstorm missing items from any "Dictionary". Apart from that, serious complaint** (and the fact that he clear knows no mathematics and thinks that 'e is the base of the natural logarith' and 'e is Euler's constant' are two distinct definitions), I did enjoy reading the book, and recommend it for your washroom.

9. Like I give a frock: Fashion Forecasts and Meaningless Misguidance by Michi Girl (Michi is the pen-name imaginary friend of Chloe Quigley and Daniel Pollock). Illustrated by Kat Macleod. This was a highly enjoyable, beautifully illustrated book, with no more intellectual pretention than Go Fug Yourself, but as wickedly funny. If the lovely layered, collaged, multimedia illustrations weren't reason enough, the questionaire regardining whether it is acceptable to wear fishnets to work, or definitions like "fashion vermin: noun. a once-cute animal that has become far too popular for its own good" ("Oh, deer, there are currently over 1.5 million web pages that feature a reference to a deer brooch"), and the petition to put an end to badly dressed pets make it worth its price.

Next up will be:
10. Beautiful Evidence by Edward Tufte, because some of us are obsessed with text and images as a means of conveying information - we may be scientists but our bookshelves are stuffed with the folios of da Vinci and the complete works of Blake. (See, not only Reynardin finds Type (the bookstore) dangerous.)


{Series so far: books read, more books read, books read, books read continues, more books read, I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII,XIX, XX, XXI, XXII, XXIII XXIV, XXV, XXVI, XXVII, XXVIII, XXIX, XXX, XXXI}

*To my knowledge, no relation.
** Now before any of you say, "But, you're a scientist!" consider this:
1) most of these definitions I learned in High School
2) tell me honestly that you have not seen a single one of these before? Surely, if nothing else, you've seen the phrase 'Q & A' or 'm' for meter (or metre if you're British).
3) My Dictionary of Physics cost about $10 and is readily available in any University booksore. Likewise, my Dictionary of Earth Science.
4) Last, but not least, consider, wikipedia, where, with 10 minutes effort one could fill in dozens of missing definitions.

Y is for yak, yin-yang and yellow

The alphabet quilt top almost complete!

This is the Y block showing my linocut yak in grey with a turquoise letterpress Y on yellow, and three panels printed with a linocut yin-yang. I chose to purposely have the yin-yangs not aligned.

All letters are now complete.



I carved the yak on this lino I bought with R&F which I do not like. Not all lino is created equal! I bet there are potential printmakers out there who decided they are not up for the task, if they are only familiar with this stuff. Two thumbs down on the thin, hard-to-carve, black (so hard to draw upon), "lino" with a non-linear response. However, I am stubborn, hence the yak.

I do love colour.

All that remains for this quilt top is a bordering frame, which I now think I need. Then I can begin the actual quilting part of this exercise. I've bought my batting. I need to set out the backing and start basting. (Do these terms mean anything to you?)

Just Y left to go

This is cheating a bit - the last two rows are not attached yet, just lain there... but I wanted to have a look at what it would be like.

In other news, it appears that RM got Shanghaied.

V is for vixen and viper

Another square in the ongoing alphabet quilt project: the vixen in the snow is block printed on an old button-down shirt in silver and rust ink; the viper (She: the snake, from the Chinese zodiac series) is block printed on a new cotton print fabric; V is a letterpress V printed on cotton. I also included the floral patterned cotton because it made me think of vines.

I only have U, X and Y left to make. Then I will have completed my quilt-top.

Z is for zebra...

This is my lino block printed zebras (Chevy and Burchell varieties) in black water based ink on fuschia and red fabric, with a white impression of a letterpress zed, for my alphabet quilt-in-progress.

Letters remaining: Q, U, V, X, Y.

N is for natillus and numbers; O is for ox

So I was explaining to how I wanted to carve a nautillus linoleum block for some time but it worried me, because I could not wrap my head around nautillus anatomy. I mean a) they are Class-A WEIRD and b) they seem to appear different in evert photo. Finally, it occurred to me that their very oddness should actually free me, rather than restrain me. I mean, no one else knows precisely what they look like either (encephalopod marine biologists excepted).

The N square of the quilt is made with one original lino block print of a nautillus in a sort of pale burgundy on blue cotton which I printed with my collection of letterpress numbers in various colours and N. I highlighted the N with embroidery.


My O square of the quilt comes from my Niu: the Ox lino block of Chinese Zodiac prints. The ox is printed in silver on navvy cotton along with a vintage letterpress O.


This is the post-z block to fill in the corner. It is the entire alphabet of vintage letterpress letters in various colours printed every which way. The quilt will be 7 rows of 4 so there are two more blocks than the number of letters in the alphabet.

See, I am getting somewhere.


To be completed: Q, U, V, X, Y and Z.