Design Concept

The Marine Science Center in Port Townsend, Washington puts a light trap into the sea every night to catch and count crab larvae, which are then returned to the sea. One morning, in 2022, they found a tiny baby octopus in the bucket. Since they had raised a previous octopus and a tank was available, they decided to keep this one. He is a giant Pacific octopus, and they named him Kakantu. When he was found, Kakantu was the size of a grain of rice (left). In September of 2024, when we visited him, he had grown into quite a large fellow. The docents said he had been fed recently and was very active that day. They said they could tell he was feeling happy because he had turned red. As he whooshed about his tank, I took photos. It was a challenging photo situation, because there were reflections off the glass of the tank from one side of the building and sunlight, from the windows on the other side of the building backlighting the tank. There were also scratches on the glass. Of the 263 photos I took there were 3-4 that I could actually use. I still did a lot of digital painting and adjustment to produce the final image for my quilt design. For the background, I chose a fabric from the collection of fabrics that I hand-painted with dye in the 1990s and photographed it. I made a line drawing that looked like the shapes of kelp, floating in the water, and filled that with the image of a different hand-painted fabric. I layered the three images to create the design for the quilt top. I designed matching binding strips and sent the digital images to Spoonflower to be printed on cotton fabric.

The quilting is done with many different colors of polyester and acrylic thread, and the backing fabric is from my Splash collection for Benartex.

The name Kakantu comes from the Klallam language and has two meanings, according to the Klallam Dictionary1. The first is the name of a girl in a story told by Amy Allen who is the grandmother of Ron Allen, the current Tribal Council Chairman of the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe. In the story, the girl, Kakantu, fell in love with a blackfish [orca] and went to live with him. The second meaning of the word is the area around the Point Wilson Lighthouse spit. This name was approved by the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe. You can learn more about the Klallam language, spoken on the North shores of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula since time immemorial at klallamlanguage.org.

Kakantu was released into the Salish Sea in December, 2024. (see video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQCdEoM1QuA

Exhibitions:

• Mid-Atlantic Quilt Festival, Hampton, VA, February 27-March 2, 2025 (Second Place: Wall Quilts)
• Pennsylvania National Quilt Extravaganza, Greater Philadelphia Expo Center, September 11-14, 2025 (Second Place: Wall Quilts)

Publications

• None as of 09/11/2025