First of all, this is a one of kind quilt and there is no pattern available. There are over two hundred fabrics in the top, collected over a period of time. I have included a few photos of the process of making this quilt, just so you can see that there were quite a few steps to achieve the final product. The design was rendered on graph paper, with colored pencils, since this was designed way before computer quilt programs were available.
This quilt was inspired by the three-story aquarium at Monterey Bay, California. When you walk into the building the first thing you see is this enormous glass fronted aquarium. The day we were there the sun was streaming in through the golden kelp, with schools of fish swimming through the streams of light. It was a quilt in the making and a sight that I could not get out of my mind. Bargello strip piecing was a technique with which I was familiar and felt that the undulating kelp would be best illustrated with this particular technique. My Heart 'n' Diamond Bargello is an example of the type of piecing that was required to make the quilt top.
This very large vision, could not be contained in a small quilt, it had to be king-sized and so it is. As I worked on the strips, I pinned them to a narrow area in my sewing room, just the width that you see. So as I finished the strips, I laid them out on the floor of our two story hall. Then I could look at them, three units at a time, from upstairs. In other words it wasn't until the quilt was finished, that I finally saw it as a whole, which was a very interesting experience.
My original intention was to applique fish on the quilt, but as the strip units lay on the hall floor, there seemed to be fish swimming through the kelp, just from the shading of the various print fabrics, so that idea was discarded. The undulating strips on the border illustrate more kelp, twisting and surrounding the whole. The center was machine quilted with hand quilting in the border.
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