Last New Quilt of 2020: No More Dark Sky

 The final call of the year for our art quilt group 4 Common Corners was "Bright Sky: Dark Sky".  Where I grew up in New Mexico, the skies are the brightest clearest blue you ever saw, and up in the rural areas at high altitude, the nights were dark and the sky gazing was amazing.  In contrast, now I live at low altitude in a biggish city and the light pollution is terrible.  There are hardly any visible stars (comparatively) and there is never complete darkness.  The most the sky gets is a dark muddy brown.

As a result, I decided to take light pollution as my theme for the Bright Sky: Dark Sky challenge.  In addition to obscuring star gazing, light pollution is bad for other reasons.  It can impair astronomical observations, and can disrupt the circadian rhythms of a variety of plant and animal life.  This can cause subsequent physiological changes and severely disrupt ecosystems.  A couple of years ago while visiting a national park (I can't remember which one- Glacier maybe?) we heard a park ranger talk about the dangers of light pollution to the local ecosystems  (even inside relatively low population, non-urban parks) and about the things the park service was doing to try to combat it.

The quilt is meant to go from the "dark sky" characterized by deep purple/black background and clear sparkling stars and transition into the muddied brown skies so characteristic of my urban areas.  I decided to use my silhouette to cut layers designed to stack up like this piece, but it had to be flat so I just quilted the layers to the surface rather than stacking them out into the third dimension.

This was my original fabric pull; I started with a dark purple velvet fabric to use as my background and then grabbed a variety of different fabrics to use with it.  They're all clothing or decorator fabrics, some silk, some polyester, some brown suiting with pale brown pinstripe (somehow I have yards and yards of this), some black sheer swiss dot, some ravely silver lame, and a buch of other random things.  One of my favorites was that piece of gold with black velous embossed flowers?  I'm sure it's polyester and I never knew what to do with it, but it reminds me of that 70s wallpaper where there were fuzzy floral or repeating elements that were fun to touch in my grandmother's house.

There are three panels in the quilt, and each panel has four cut out applique layers that pile on top of each other.  In the bottom of the picture below you can see the first four layers and in the top of that picture you see the second four layers.

In this case, I wanted the "frame" from the silhouette cutter for the quilt, after I pulled it off I was left with all these little pieces.  I saved them all and will use them up in something.

This is the final quilt. It was extremely hard to photograph, what looks like white in the top panel is actually silver but was so reflective it was impossible to get a good picture, especially when the rest of the piece was so dark.  The top panel is meant to be bright clear stars in a dark sky.  The four layers line up in concentric rings with crisp clear colors.  As you go down, the colors and the alignment of the shapes and layers gets progressively muddier, more like our urban skies.

No More Dark Sky, c. Shannon Conley, 2020, 42" x 28"

In this up close shot you can see the four different layers in the bottom panel.  The edges of each panel were really uneven, so I covered the edges up by couching several layers of fuzzy yarn around each rectangle.  To make that seem more like a design element, I also couched vertical lines of yarn down the side borders and used the same yarns to finish the quilt edges.

This quilt was truly awful to work on and make.  It was for an end-of-year deadline and I really wanted to finish it before Thanksgiving.  But I had constant (CONSTANT!) struggles with the quilting.  I decided not to back all the layers with fusible because I didn't want to quilt through six layers of fabric plus four layers of fusible, but then with only a little bit of fusible holding down the floppy layers, getting them to stay put during quilting was virtually impossible.  Then I decided to use the same purple velvet for the back as I did for the base layer, so it was extremely difficult to rip out stitching.  But the worst is that my sewing machine basically died while quilting this.  I couldn't go more than 8 or 10 inches without my thread shredding.  I tried everything, different threads, different needles, different fabrics, different tension, cleaning the machine, nothing worked.  It was miserable to quilt and made me discouraged about doing anything.  I figured it was just all my weird fabrics, but I took it home over Thanksgiving to finish at my mom's and it quilted JUST FINE on my mother's sewing machine.  I was so so frustrated.  By the end I almost hated the thing.  I'm still really interested in the theme, and maybe someday I'll make something else in this vein that won't have so many bad vibes bottled up inside it.

As a coda on the sewing machine front; after getting home from Thanksgiving, I tried to sew something else, and my machine just completely quit.  It wouldn't even sew a straight line much less quilt.  I was so aggravated, I put it in time out for the whole month of December and didn't sew anything until Christmas except to finish the gift bag (that's what I was sewing with a straight stitch when it died completely) using my small backup machine.  I was really worried it had completely died and I was trying to decide if I would need to buy a new domestic machine for quilting or save up to invest in a table-mounted longarm or what.  All very unpleasant.  I haven't been particularly pleased with the Janome service here, but my mom really likes her Janome dealer in New Mexico, so I figured I'd make an appointment with her person and drop it off there when I was home for Christmas just to see if they could do anything.

It turns out there were like a million things wrong with it.  It was a bit gratifying since the worst thing is to have a machine that won't sew and a service professional who can't figure out what's wrong.  The laundry list included several broken things that the guy said he'd never seen before, some things that he thinks were errors from previous servicing, and some things that were related to normal wear or bad practice on my part.  He was able to fix all of it for me (though with a warning that some pieces were hand made to avoid having to replace the whole tension unit so that might be coming in future) and he got it back to me in just two days (OVER CHRISTMAS) in time for me to quilt on it quite a bit over the holidays and now it is working well.  So SUPER SUPER shout out to Eugene and Jackie at A Quilting Stitchuation in Ruidoso New Mexico.  If anyone is traveling through southern New Mexico I encourage you to stop by there.  Even though Ruidoso is a very small town, it's a very big quilt store with tons of fabric (I bought some and some sparkly rainbow vinyl-who knows what I'll do with that), notions, and all the other stuff you'd expect, in addition to being a regionally known Janome dealer.  As of right now they are open, but are using good COVID practices, and I think you can also order some things for them online.