After many years and several setbacks, a friend from high school is finally receiving her MA in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages). Hooray!! Of course, I have to make a graduation quilt to celebrate!

She’s quite a geeky lady of her own, and is particularly into fish, especially ancient ones. When I asked her what species would be good to include on a quilt, she mentioned that she would love to see a set of creatures from the Burgess Shale, which is a set of ancient fossils. She even sent me a link to a website containing information on all of the little critters whose fossils were found at this site, and I can’t help but think that they’re all cute in a geeky way.

So I have two options: make something “serious,” probably in earth tones and batiks, depicting these critters in rock formations… or something “fun,” in bright colors. Guess which I’m going with???

Somehow, I came across the idea of conveying her love of ancient critters by doing something along the lines of a teenybopper magazine cover, but with fossilized specimens instead of Justin Beiber.

I swear, where I come up with these things, I have NO clue. But she LOVES the idea, so it’s time for me to set out designing the whole thing.

I worked up a quick doodle of a few critters, but I still need to figure out how to arrange everything. (Apologies for the quick, low-contrast pic, I had to turn the flash off and Photoshop will only let me tweak contrast so far!)

I know how I plan to do the background, and place things on top of it, putting appliqué of the various critters on top of some little colored starbursts (just a quick MS Paint doodle here):

Overall, I think this is going to be a fun project, very silly in some ways, but I think the composition of it is good from an artistic standpoint, and it will be good practice for my appliqué skills before I launch face-first into that Hildebrandt Star Wars quilt.

Got one other project (another graduation quilt to finish), the pink/black/white quilt that I’ve TOTALLY decided to re-do:

This one will be super-pretty, too, but with all the different fabrics I’m using (it’s very scrappy), it’ll take a good long while to cut out.

Unfortunately, my quilting has been somewhat slow lately as the tendonitis in my wrist has decided to flare up yet again, but I start physical therapy on Monday so we’ll see what happens with that. Hopefully I can get back to quilting soon!!