Paraboloid #1

I've been using the laser cutter lately for a lot of quilts, and after cutting the wooden Christmas ornaments I thought there might be a way to do some small geometric sculptures.  Of course having never worked in this media I had no idea how it would go, but I drafter this series of nested parabolas with the idea that I could generate something with graceful 3D curves.  Well, that turned out to be quite a bit harder than expected.  I sewed the pieces all together there through those holes about halfway down on the left and right and I thought I could just prop it up from there, but of course it kept collapsing.  In the picture below it's being held up by being pinned to my work table.

I started stitching through various holes to try to get the shape to hold, here are a couple of pictures in progress.  It was very hard to get the individual paraboloids to be spaced evenly.  Even the final thing isn't perfect.  And then to make matters worse, I actually broke two of them halfway through the stitching.  I'm so thankful I was able to glue/clamp the broken pieces back together.

Here's a finished view

Paraboloid #1, c. Shannon Conley, 2020

The string is different colors of sparkly Ricky Tims razzle dazzle thread.  I bought a bunch of spools of it a few years ago, but then didn't wind up doing much bobbin quilting, so I thought this would be a fun place to use it.

I had fun with this experiment (sort of) and like the end shapes that were created.  I have two more wood "sculptures" to share, but I can tell you I don't think I'm going to be changing my primary medium any time soon!