jinian | an embroidered lionfish

In my family, we make a quilt for each new baby. A bunch of relatives -- the exact number varies and can sometimes be fraught -- get "baby squares" of plain fabric to decorate, and then the squares are assembled with sashing in between to make a blanket for the baby. I got one of the first quilts made this way, and we've been doing them ever since. Sometimes it takes a while for the squares to all be done and for the quilt to come together; I think I hold the record for late quilt assembly, having given one to my second cousin M when she was already five, but that was not entirely my fault. (Though it was more fun giving a gift celebrating her birth to someone who was old enough to think it was cool!)

This square has been kind of a lot of trouble. My family sent it to me when I was in Japan, right before my nice relaxing project was replaced by a nightmare; then I came home and had to write my thesis and defend it. After that they started being snarky and pesky and I got oppositional. I had a piece of fabric I'd gotten in Japan that had inspired me to make a fish and coral for the square, but that fabric turned out to be completely unsuitable for applique, just way too coarsely woven. So between needing to come up with a new technique and getting mad when people bugged me -- I would like to see them do a Ph.D. -- it took a long time to get this properly started.

But it looks awesome now. :)

The coral is silk-painted; I experimented with a new water-based resist, which worked just as well as gutta resist and was a lot easier to clean up though harder to mix before using. They don't represent particular species very accurately, since silk painting is not a very precise medium. I'm very pleased with the layering and blotching and flow of the colors.

The lionfish is Pterois volitans, which falls into my series of baby squares based on marine animals. All of them are vaguely subversive in ways that aren't obvious to anyone but me. In the case of the lionfish, it is frilly and beautiful but also one of the most dangerous things on the reef, which pleases me as a message to the son of a too-macho cousin. Not sure how I feel about its status as an ecologically disastrous invasive in the Atlantic; maybe that part's more relevant to my experience with the project.