New Quilt: 33°20'N, 105°33'W

Late this summer, after I was done making all the pieces for the Capitol show, I decided to squeeze in one more large piece to enter into Quilt National '19.  Unfortunately, it didn't get in, but that's ok- I'll enter it into something else, and for now it gets to hang in my house.

I started with pale purple shiny polyester fabric and painted it to look like this big abstract bouquet.  I really wanted to bring in some orange and red amid my favorite teal/pink/purple combo.  Like the last couple of times, I put the piece of backing fabric on the table underneath the front fabric so that when I painted it, the paint seeped through to the back.  I like doing it this way; the back mostly matches the front (though a little fainter) and I don't waste so much paint.

Of course Blue had to help me baste it for quilting,  I think I shared this pic before.  Luckily this was before the massive rain mud season, so his contribution wasn't terrible.

This is what it looked like after quilting.  he front is on the left, the back is on the right.  You can tell that the colors are more intense on the front, but generally pretty similar to the back.

After quilting I started cutting out holes and melting the edges.  I was looking forward to doing another openwork piece, and I like the way the cutouts came out on this one.  

After cutting the holes, I cut an irregular edge around the whole thing and then zig-zagged on my roving-wrapped wire for the edge.  I like this way of doing edging.  IT makes the edges feel finished, they're a little sculptable, and the irregularities in the roving contribute to the organic feel of the piece.

To sculpt the whole thing I covered it with fabric stiffener and then draped it over crumpled paper forms.  The stiffener works pretty well, but not quite enough to fully support a piece this big.  

33°20'N, 105°33'W,  c. Shannon Conley, 2018, 64" x 34" x 6"

Its name is the coordinates of the place near my parents' house where we go hiking, but I can never remember the actual title, so in my brain its just called Bouquet.  The hanging slat sits about halfway down because otherwise you can see it through the holes, but of course even with stiffener, the top flopped forward.  I designed this infrastructure for it,  each of the three wooden pieces (which are now painted white and bolted to the slat, not just held with binder clips) velcro to the quilt holding up the weight.

This was a fun project and I love walking in to my bedroom and seeing it on the wall!