stream big pot of hummus by tom rosenthal

Bubonic Plague | Influenza | Measles | Whooping Cough | Typhoid

Cooking Jam  -  Teija Lehto, 2016

Finnish,b.1965-

Behold my Hercules beetle! I took a huge chunk of time away from piecing and sewing in general due to work insanity, but I finally got around to finishing this boy.

The fabric is all second hand: the background fabric came from a local craft thrift store, and the green/orange and brown/gold speckled fabrics are twice reused kimono silks. The kimono fabric was gifted to me by the wonderful Madame Button, who used the original garments to make these gorgeous corsets.

She got the kimono because they were either new dead stock, or in such bad condition that they couldn't be worn. She can't use the fabric once it's cut up smaller than a corset panel, so she's been chucking the scraps at me for a while, and I've finally gotten over my fear of cutting up such beautiful silks. Go check out The Bad Button on Instagram and Facebook and drool over her other gorgeous pieces.

I decided to forgo sandwiching and quilting this because I wanted the piecing lines to be the highlight. For now it's tacked to a plain cotton bed sheet until I can find a nicer frame for it.

Pine martens are an option!

I went pine marten, as I've been involved in helping their reintroduction to Wales, and then I wrestled with myself for an Age before finally going hedgehog.

Birds: puffins were the easiest choice. The UK - and Pembrokeshire Coast National Park in west Wales specifically - has a significant portion of the global breeding population of puffins, thanks to Skomer and Grassholm islands. In a country with the biodiversity depletion we have (bottom 10% of countries globally for biodiversity), the islands of Pembrokeshire are almost obscene in how high their biodiversity is, and it's for breeding specifically. We can be justly proud of those. Plus, puffins are fun clowns.

And then I agonised about the others until I finally went for the Great Spotted Woodpecker, a bird I do periodically see and get excited about every time

The Lumped-Together-Others: the bumblebee, you have to. I adore bumblebees.

And then I went for the marsh fritillary, because it's super endangered and I'm an environmentalist with a specialism in habitat management and ecology, and therefore spend a non-trivial amount of my time explaining how to manage for the little assholes.