I will be reporting weekly on a new art project on which I am working. I am in the concept stage, and hopehopehope I will follow this through to the completed project.

February 29 — Delicious AHA! moment today. Quilt-wise. Long time in coming. I haven’t been thinking about quilting for quite a while (except for the occasional quilt-pang). I started piecing a new one last fall and it has not been going well.

However, today as I was walking the long walk down the hall of the Chemical Engineering department, I was in my gridding mode. That is, I was looking at everything and kind of superimposing a grid on top, making a quilt top out of all I saw. You can see some of the inspirations I’ve had in the past:

Back to Chemical Engineering. A graphic on one of the posters caught my eye (these are large-size reports, for lack of a better word, of experiments and computations that are presented at sessions. Academic style!) The graphic was rectangular chart, like a quilt, good color combos, looked like it would be easy to piece. Walking back past it, I noticed the graphic was one of the results of a computation about Circadian rhythms!

From Wikipedia:

A circadian rhythm is a roughly-24-hour cycle in the physiological processes of living beings

Oh, my. Ding ding ding! A quilt, something you sleep under, depicting the wake/rest cycle of humans!

I giddily presented my idea to my friend Professor S (a chemical engineer), who got excited, too. Just for fun, we surfed around for some other quilt-possible images (protein arrays are particularly beautiful). Tryptophan (the sleep-inducing turkey stuff) has a cool-looking molecular structure, but since it’s a simple amino acid we didn’t really see any images that were quilt-translatable. [I need to mention here that I am unable to piece and sew anything but squares and rectangles.] [I also need to mention I am a total layperson, science-wise. I suspect I shall be learning more than I ever thought I would about this stuff, this chemically stuff.]

We both agreed that the Circadian quilt was the killer idea. I am thinking about how to approach Professor F, a scientist who I work for and who was the Principal Investigator of the computation depicted on the poster. I am curious as to how he will react to me and my idea. “Crackpot artist”? Perhaps. But maaaaybe he’ll get all excited about it and want to be collaborative about it.

I haven’t been this excited about a crafty art project in a long, long time. At some point in this blog I will unleash my long-held views and desires and interests in the merging of art, science and technology.

March 3 — I finally made some time with Professor F. I think I freaked him out, as I prefaced my little speech with “I don’t know how you’re going to take this..” But he was thrilled! He loved the idea, and was right on it; he’ll be sending the hi-res version of the graphic in the next week. He’s totally on board and gets it. It sounds like he comes from a smart and creative family, so he’s not completely left-brained in his approach towards life. Thank goodness!

I had another AHA! later on: maybe the quilt pattern (the pattern that’s sewn on top of the quilt) can be ECG graph patterns from a sleeping person! Like this! Arrrrrrrgh, this is great.

March 5 — I received the high-res graphic from Professor F today. Behold, Comparisons of Various Metrics, Average Metric Values — Logarithm of Scaled Sensitivities from the computation Capturing Phase Dynamics of Circadian Clocks:

Isn’t it beeyootiful? Fortunately, Professor S is a good scientist, teacher, and friend, and he gave me a rudimentary overview of what I was looking at. It’s all about proteins. That’s what I retained. Oh, and this other random fact: did you know that insulin is a protein? And you can’t administer a protein in pill form, since the body “eats” it? Hence, insulin must be injected. I like science! More next week!

Call to scientists: please weigh in with whatever additions/corrections you can supply.

Go to Quiltreport 2: Science Quilt

Related hamlinks:

• My quilts and other projects on flickr
• Today, I taught someone to quilt
• Ducks in Bonnets!
• Gee’s Bend
• i’m a member of a qult