by Robert Brow, www.brow.on .ca, Kingston, Ontario

At the Quilters Convention I was asked how I had made such an astonishing quilt. None of them believed me when I told them the story.

"I had planned on making a quilt exactly like this as my masterpiece, and I had everything ready to begin. Suddenly my husband walked in and suggested we go on a trip. We had never been on a trip before, so I didn’t waste a minute. To avoid leaving a mess I threw all the materials, the design, the backing, the pieces of cloth, the scissors, the needles, the thread, into the drier.

When we came back a month later I found the drier was turning, and when I opened it up I found this quilt, exactly the way I had planned it. As my husband and I discussed how this could have happened we decided a rat must have come and fiddled with the controls. As the drier turned and turned, a needle must have got threaded, a colored piece of cloth got cut and the needle joined it to another. As this went on day after day by an incredible fluke of chance the quilt evolved to perfection.

So nobody made this quilt. It evolved by chance."

The interesting fact about quilt evolution is that the sequence required for a woman to cut and sew a quilt and the sequence required for that quilt to emerge by chance would be exactly the same. Science can set out the sequence of evolution, but it is outside the realm of science to decide whether or not there was intelligent design.