"Giant Kelp Forest" by NOAA Office of Response and Restoration on Flickr (Attribution 2.0 Generic [CC BY 2.0])
I must admit that the idea of a kelp-forest quilt is strangely intriguing. Julia has a serious interest in sheep, of course, but when I asked her about the other, she said, unexpectedly dreamily, "I would live in a kelp forest if I could."
(The title of this post comes from Rachel Carson's The Edge of the Sea: "In the lowest pools the Laminarias begin to appear, called variously the oarweeds, devil’s aprons, sea tangles, and kelps. The Laminarias belong to the brown algae, which flourish in the dimness of deep waters and polar seas.... To look into such a pool is to behold a dark forest, its foliage like the leaves of palm trees, the heavy stalks of the kelps also curiously like the trunks of palms.... One of these laminarian holdfasts is something like the roots of a forest tree, branching out, dividing, subdividing, in its very complexity a measure of the great seas that roar over this planet.")
"Kelp Forest at Monterey Bay Aquarium" by Vadim Kurland on Flickr (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0])
The top photo is actually fairly close to what I saw in my mind's eye at the thought of "kelp forest quilt", just sideways thus --
There is an intriguing tutorial on piecing curvy strips from Kathleen Loomis here -- and the other day I bought the pattern for a "Color Work Table Runner" by Jean Wells that on the kelp-forest-quilt scale comes about halfway between basic "wonky strips" and Loomis's free-wheelers.
But I have to admit that the idea of piecing all of those curves -- because they'd have to be lengthwise, wouldn't they! -- on a full-sized twin bed quilt makes my heart sink to my boots. There is also Purl Soho's "Prism" free pattern, say done in a combination of kelp-y batiks and ocean-y solids ...
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