I've always been fascinated with tree of life quilts and tree of life imagery. I love family trees and living imagery. I put a tree of life into my own garden of Eden (it was filled with all of Darwin's different types of finches) into my Eucharistic Prayer C: Convergence quilt which was an exploration of the intertwined nature of science, evolution, and faith, but I've never done a specific tree of life quilt.
When I saw that Science and Math Quilts was one of the special exhibits at this year's International Quilt Festival in Houston, I knew I had to make something. Of course I've made many science quilts before but none were big enough (Houston wanted something at least 50x50). I decided to finally make a tree of life quilt, and the science theme led me to dendrograms!
Dendrograms are used most broadly for hierarchical clustering, that is, to classify the relatedness of objects and the time or distance between different objects. They come in both linear and polar (circular) forms, but the basic idea is the same. Dendrograms are widely used in biology, for example, in evolutionary trees to identify how closely species are related and how far back in time different groups diverged, or to classify genes or cell types. They are quite literally "trees of life". You can see an example of a polar dendrogram below. Dendrograms are a great way to look at how closely related items are.
I drew a dendrogram in Adobe Illustrator, it follows the organizational rules for dendrograms but doesn't plot any particular organisms or genes.
My background was some pale pink (I think) jacquard weave fabric. If you look closely, you may be able to see the roses that are woven into it. I painted it teal and green, and then set the pattern on top of my dendrogram pattern.
I decided to construct this like a mosaic, with the lines of the dendrogram represented by the grout lines between pieces, and each central shape cut out of a different fabric. It was a great chance to use some of my cool hand printed/painted fabrics as well as other fun fabrics from my stash. All the fabrics are silk or polyester, or other shiny fabrics.
Here you can see them as I was cutting and laying out each shape. The paper pattern is visible underneath to help me line things up.
The pieces are all fused down; unfortunately, the background fabric wasn't super iron resistant, and I melted a big obvious hole in it. More annoyingly, since the background was hand painted, I despaired of getting anything to patch it with that would match. I finally wound up being able to trim off small pieces from the edge and using those to patch the hole, but I was lucky that the fabric I painted was a little bigger than I needed the final quilt to be. You can see the patch in the final quilt if you look really closely, but it's largely invisible. I was so aggravated though!!!
Here's the whole thing basted for quilting, the backing fabric is some sort of super bright floral print polyester satin stuff, kind of like what you'd use for a frilly twirly skirt. It's not really something I'd use for anything else, but it makes a fine backing.
Come back on Monday to see the final quilt!
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I love this quilt design!
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