Nymphaeaceae

I have so many many not-quite-finished projects, but when it came time to spotlighting a finished quilt for the Blogger's Quilt Festival, I could not believe how many of my finished quilts have already been covered in my blog.  Virtually every one I had here that I could take a picture of or had taken a picture before I shipped it off has already been shown here.  With one exception: Nymphaeaceae.

Quite some time ago (yea, I could look it up or I could just move on), a floristic inventory of the local botanical garden was begun & a while after that it was mostly finished; these things are never finished-finished.  As it was wrapping up, the wife of the inventoryer, the guy collecting & identifying one of everything in the garden, & I took a fraction of the digital images & made a quilt for a show at the museum of natural history (they were having a quilting natural fladidah-themed exhibit) & we made this.  Meanwhile, the manager of the collection was doing everything in his power to make things easier for us.  By everything, I mean everything, including re-prioritizing what specimens got mounted & photographed when so we could get the images we needed ASAP & not taking it to heart when they turned out not to be quite what we wanted & oh, could we have this instead?

In the course of this whole process, it became very, Very, VERY clear which image was his favorite.  He used it for buttons on the website, he used it as his screen saver; everywhere he could squeeze it in, he squeezed.  When we finished our main project & started planning our Thanks For All Your Help project there was no other choice. 

As with all the images for our original quilt, I printed the images on 100% cotton using the Bubblejet product & an HP Photosmart printer.  We used a single close up of the primary image for the center of the front & several others that we cut up to incorporate into the sawtooth border.  As patterns go, it is not complex; we wanted to be careful that the quilt layout not clash with the image we were trying to highlight.  For the back, we printed the whole specimen with label.  While not particularly important in terms of the quilt, it is (almost) the most important part to an herbarium manager. The whole thing is less than 30" x 30"

If you want to see the original specimen (kind of) you can search for accession number 214601 thru 214601 at the collection search page.