Green Leaf Series detail

Having indulged in some trapunto, bead and silk ribbon embroidery and thread painting on a cruise in April I’ve returned with a yen to do more crocheting!  That’s how it goes I guess.  Mind and projects all over the place.

Anyway, I am seized with the desire to make yet more leaves.  This time, though, I want to explore the inheritance of human characteristics using leaves as metaphors for parents and children.  I hope this is not as silly and/or futile as it sounds.  I’m fascinated by the way children in a family will all be slightly different from one another, unless they are identical twins.  They each have “bits” of their parents’ characteristics.  Size, colouring, personality, appearance, shape, are all traceable to a parent.  That is unless, of course, something that is not expressed in either parent but carried by them as a recessive gene from a grandparent emerges in a child.  This is one of the things that  makes the whole process of having children so fascinating.  Each new baby is a little surprise package.  We feel we recognise it, it’s “ours”,  yet somehow we also know that we haven’t seen that precise person before.

Think first of two people of reproductive age as leaves.  (This is a stretch, I know, but hang in with me!)  What if a small, knitted , smooth surfaced, yellow- green sweet potato leaf

Let’s call this “the mother”.

mated with a large crocheted, very textured dark  green and pale olive green gum leaf?

We’ll call this “the father”.

What would a “child” leaf look like? What would three of their children look like?  When each of these children partner and reproduce, what characteristics will they in turn pass on to their “children”?

This is going to be fun!! Uncertain gestation period of course.  Some of the offspring will look more like weeds.  Stay tuned though! I’ve got plenty of “DNA” to work with.