Blogger's Quilt Festival: Seymour the Coelophysis

The always awesome Bloggers Quilt Festival is here again!  Head on over to Amy's and check out all the wonderfulness.

Update: My BQF entry number is 175

This time I want to share with you a fun quilt which I recently finished featuring the dinosaur Coelophysis.  Coelophysis is the state dinosaur/fossil of New Mexico, thanks to discovery of a large bed of Coelophysis skeletons at Ghost Ranch, near Abiquiu, NM.    The quilt is called "S is For… #3: You Cleared My Name".  It's the third in a series of quilts incorporating the serpentine S shape (created in this case by the dinosaur neck and tail).  For a long time, Coelophysis was thought to be cannibalistic, but recent scholarship has shown that he did not eat his own young, and thus his name has been cleared!

The design is original.  My main concept was to have Seymour's skeleton depicted on a background of his current home while the reverse side of the quilt would depict Seymour's body in a more triassic setting.  The background on the front of the quilt is Chimney Rock, a New Mexico landmark.  The quilt is raw edge applique and is made with a variety of types of commercially available fabrics.  It is embellished with twine, trim, wool roving, beads, dryer sheets, polymer clay, foil, and paint sticks.  

The quilt is actually constructed as two completely separate pieces, each quilted and bound.  The two pieces are designed be laced together (via trim incorporated in the edging) enabling display as a two-sided back-to-front work, or unlaced and displayed side-by-side as a diptych (as shown below).  Each side is a mirror image of the other so that when the two pieces are displayed back-to-back the bones sticking out on the front side (for example in the tail) line up with the body parts (for example the tail) sticking out on the back side.  I quilted it on my old Singer 201.  It was a challenging project as I pretty much made it up as I went along!  I hope you enjoy seeing my dear Seymour (that's what Kenda named him) because I certainly enjoyed making him.  For more posts about him, click here.

S is for...#3: You cleared my name.  Displayed side-by-side, left panel is the front while the right panel is the back when displayed for two-sided hanging.

Quilting Details

 Detail of the bones and body where they stick off the edge of the quilt (taken during construction)

Detail of foreground elements

And one more, sorry, but I love the teeth!  I made them out of polymer clay and sewed them to the quilt at the very end.

Blogger's Quilt Festival Stats:

Title: S is For… #3: You Cleared My Name

Size: Each panel, 24” x 70”, 2012

Special techniques: raw edge applique, beading, handmade teeth composed of polymer clay, surface embellishment with dyed dryer sheets, wool roving etc.  Trim incorporated into faced binding to enable lacing of one side to the other.

Made and Quilted: Shannon Conley

BQF Categories: Art Quilt, Wall Hanging, Home Machine Quilted.

Super thanks to Amy for hosting such a great event!

I'm also linking up at the Off the Wall Friday Art Quilt Linky over at Nina-Marie's!

Here's the label, sorry for the out-of-focus picture!

This is the label text:

Coelophysis bauri, a carnivorous theropod dinosaur, is the state fossil of New Mexico due primarily to discovery of a large number of skeletons near Ghost Ranch, NM.  Coelophysis had long been the poster child for dinosaur cannibalism until work published by Nesbitt et al. in Biology Letters (2006) demonstrated clearly that stomach contents from mature Coelophysis were not juveniles of the same species or even dinosaurs at all, but rather were unrelated early crocodylomorph archosaurs.  In honor of Coelophysis’ “cleared name” I created this original art quilt depicting him, at approxmately full size. He is shown in his modern-day home (in front of Chimney Rock) on one side and in a more Triassic setting on the other side.  The quilt is made of commercially available fabrics of all types and embellished with twine, trim, wool roving, beads, dryer sheets, polymer clay, and paint sticks.