l to r: Lauren Vartanian and Keltie Thomas (Credit: Ted Darling)

Inspired by her infant daughter, Guelph, Ontario, artist Lauren Wright Vartanian – an OCAD grad with a specialty in sculpture and textile-based work – decided to use the downtime provided by the COVID-19 pandemic to create a science-themed ABC book for babies and toddlers, based on the felt creations she had been making and selling.

Stitching Science: Exploring Science from A–Z isn’t quite the book Vartanian initially envisioned – her chosen scientific concepts are too advanced for your average preschooler, e.g., “F is for Fractal and Fibonacci Numbers.” The almost childlike wonder and delight in scientific concepts and phenomena are definitely intact, however. Vartanian illustrates her nearly three dozen ideas and objects (some of the letters get two, as with F above) with beautiful handmade textile artwork, like squares in a quilt made especially for Neil deGrasse Tyson. Some of the images are deceptively simple and beguiling (Gravity is a Mars-like planet warping a grid that represents space-time), while others are quite complex (Utero depicts every stage of a fetus’s development within the womb). All are beautiful and fascinating in their own right, and the sheer amount of work that went into each is impressive. (The book includes an addendum with close-ups of the images, revealing their astonishing level of detail.) Author and former OWL Magazine editor Keltie Thomas contributes explanatory text for each image.

Lauren Wright Vartanian.

As audacious and visually striking as the book is, its origins as a preschool primer create a conflict in its execution that often muddies its educational impact. The images are beautiful to look at, but many feel too basic for the book’s intended age range. Also, they are not labelled, which doesn’t matter much if the subject is, say, a hangry T. Rex, but does matter a lot when what’s being depicted is a black hole or a cell, where it’s not immediately obvious what we’re looking at. The text, too, often veers between too basic and too advanced in its explanations, which creates opportunities for misunderstandings. (A scientifically minded nitpicker might, for example, raise objections to atoms described as being “in the air you breathe, the water you drink, the ground you stand on and the stars above your head,” when, more precisely, they are the air you breathe, the water you drink, etc.) It’s as hard to imagine an older reader using the book as a reference as it is a younger reader grasping fractals or quantum theory.

Stitching Science is a worthy effort full of delightful imagery, but as a hybrid art book and educational text, it’s never quite certain if it’s fish or fowl.