The Armadillo and the Cow-finished

 Earlier this week (here and here) I shared some in process pictures and the story behind my latest art quilt, The Armadillo and the Cow.  I'm back today to share pictures of the final piece.

The Armadillo and the Cow.  c. Shannon Conley, 2021, 35"h x 49"w, Photo Mike Cox

The edges are finished with couched bright pink chenille yarn, and I love the festive feel of the brightly colored trim.  All the pink trim and pink/black doilies came from my trim and lace collection.  The little bright pink bits along the top were remnants from the vintage doilies I used to cover the head and legs.  The green trim is some that was in my stash from Georgia (thanks Georgia!) which I think she dyed a long time ago.  

The rubber stoppers were sewn on with sparkly Ricky Tims Razzle Dazzle thread, so you can see them sparkle if you look from the side.  The quilting was tricky since you only get one shot when quilting through thick paper, but the rainbow thread really makes me smile.

His head is mounted on a wire, so while not really a true bobble head, it does bounce if you bop him on the nose.  I adjusted his eye a little to make it look like he's glaring a bit suspiciously at the cow.  Like he can't quite tell whether she is having more fun than he is.

When you look at the side view you can see the dimension a little more.  The armadillo body is held on with magnets so it can easily be removed if I need to work on the background.  It protrudes about 4-5 inches from the background.  The cow is mounted on springs about 1.5" from the background, so she boings nicely if you tickle her.

I love how this turned out.  I'm still working on a hidden frame for it (mounted to the back to provide support), but it just makes me happy to see it on my design wall.  I'm still trying to think of a name for the armadillo and the cow, so feel free to leave any suggestions in the comment box!

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The Cow part of the Armadillo and the Cow

 I blogged earlier this week about my rainbow armadillo, and I'm back today to share about the next phase of this project.  The rainbow armadillo would be lonely without his cow friend.  But of course she was always going to be smaller than him.  Poor cow friend!

To give her a little depth I made her out of two layers of fabric covered EVA foam and then hand stitched on more vintage painted doily.  She was supposed to look like just a black and white cow, but the laciness of the doily makes it feel like she's wearing jelly shoes and a black veil over her face.  I think she must be a very fashionable cow?  Her tail is made from some small bits of alpaca yarn which somehow seemed fitting.  It's a bit hard to see in the pictures, but she has a cute dimensional ear, a horn made out of a pretty black glass bead, and a beaded eye.  Sweet cow!

Both the cow and the armadillo needed a background to live on, and early on in the process I decided to use recycled light and electron microscopy images for the background.  I'm not sure why, but sometimes you get an idea and just have to run with it.

The images are old printouts from the days before we had good digital cameras, so they're on stiff shiny photopaper.  The ones on the bottom are light micrographs of the mouse retina.  Some are from blind mice and some from normal mice.  The ones in the top half are electron micrographs with labeling for specific retinal proteins.  I have folders and folders of them from old lab studies.  I think they're super cool, but we don't have any use for them at work anymore (and I have digital scans of them anyway).  The background is black felt with a layer of peltex in the middle.  It was pretty stiff to quilt (between the peltex and the thick photopaper) but I knew I'd need a stiff background since the armadillo and cow would be protruding forward off the front.  Even with the stiff background, the whole final quilt is going to have to mount to a backing board I think.

As I started mocking things up on the wall, it became evident that even with the rainbow explosion of armadillo, the whole thing was way too black and white.  I started brainstorming ways to add more color and contrast. I settled on three approaches.  First, I dug out some more vintage doilies and trims I painted, you can see the results of that effort in the final post.  Second, I decided to cut away the pictures from around the armadillo and cow so there would be black around each one to give your eye  a little place to rest.  Finally, I decided to stitch on a brightly colored border made out of rubber stoppers.  We recently moved labs and I discovered a drawer full of hundreds of black rubber stoppers, more than our lab could use in three lifetimes.  Inspired by my friend Susan Lenz who has a fantastic series of mandalas featuring stitched found objects, I thought why not sew on the stoppers.  Conveniently, I had a whole bunch that already had two holes in them, so I brought them home and painted them!

This project involved a lot of pinning up and taking down and seeing how things looked.  My studio was an absolute explosion of disaster during this project.  Little bits and bobs and pieces of stuff and paint were everywhere, but it was so fun to work on.  Come back later this week to see the final quilt!

New Quilt- The Armadillo and the Cow

 When SAQA put out a call for entry called "Fur, Fangs, Feathers, and Fins" I knew I'd have to make an armadillo quilt.  I love armadillos, but my family still tease me about them.  We didn't have armadillos where I grew up, and the first one I saw in real life was driving back from my sister's college graduation.  I lived in Arizona at the time where I was going to grad school, but my sister had been going to college in Texas where armadillos are native.  We passed a dead one on the side of the road, and I made a comment about the poor dead baby armadillo.  My sister told me it was a normal adult armadillo and I haughtily told her that no, armadillos were about the size of cows.  I was very very sure and everyone was completely making fun of me.  Of course now I live in Oklahoma where there are armadillos all over the place, but I've always thought they were cool (if smaller than I once envisioned).

The first armadillo and cow quilt was made for me by my mom. I had a fun cow t-shirt when I was a teenager, and when it got too worn to wear she made a super cute mini-quilt for me out of it, making sure to stitch on a few little armadillo buttons.

I decided my armadillo would be large and rainbow, and started brainstorming about how to make him.  I decided to use plastic milk jugs and cherry tomato containers for the scales, so I started cutting things up and spray painting them.  I wound up making two batches of each size- I feel like this sort of thing always takes more pieces than you think.

The papers where I painted them were almost as pretty as the scales!

After I painted them, I started stitching them down to stuffed forms I made (for the head and tail) or to fabric-covered EVA foam body pieces.

Before stitching scales on the top, the head was covered in pieces of vintage doilies I'd painted pink.  I really enjoyed using a lot of recycled/reused materials in this project.  I'm not sure where all the vintage doilies came from, though I know some have been given to me by friends over the years, but I love the lacy vibe and texture they give.

Here's the overspray paper from painting some of the doilies.  I have to figure out something to do with these.

I really enjoyed all the hand stitching in this project.

I was so excited about how even this much looked, but he did look kind of funny without any ears or feet.

The feet are made to match the head (they subsequently had scale bits stitchedon) and I made claws out of gold and purple sparkle fimo clay.

Here he is with all his parts pinned to my design board.  The ears help a lot (!)

Come back later this week for more armadillo quilt goodness!

I Like #218

 Welcome to another week of things to like!

It's definitely hot summer here now, but I'm watering regularly and my plants are hanging in there.  While mowing this week I came across definite confirmation of the fate of my beautiful new hand knit sock.  This is all that is left of it after Spooky's intervention.  Sigh.

It's a good thing he's so cute.  At least here he has a dog toy.  It's two-thirds chewed up, and I have to constantly fish as many little bits out of his mouth as possible when he gets them off the toy. 

Blue and Bentley are good too- here's Blue being a sweet doofus.

I really like this blooming tree we see while walking in my neighborhood.  I'm not sure what it is, but it's leaves are sort of frondy, and it's covered in these lovely pink furry flowers.  So cool looking!

I got this fun Star Wars fabric earlier this year to make some masks out of, and unfortunately I lost mine, but I still had some of the fabric left so this weekend I used it to make a new sunglasses case and key chain, both of my previous ones having worn out.  It makes me happy to see in my purse!

The pumpkin plant is growing voraciously,  it is still covered with flowers, and yesterday I saw what might be the first baby pumpkin.  Having overgrown the entire garden patch, it has now creeped through the fence and is growing on the porch.  It's astonishing to me how fast it is growing.

I blogged this week about a new quilt based on my Grandpa's lab notebook.  It was a very special project to me and you can read more about it and see more pictures here, and here!

I hope you are having a good week!  Click over to LeeAnna's for more things to like!

Range Grasses-Finished

 Late last week I shared a post about my grandpa and a quilt I've been working on inspired by his lab notebook.  I ended that post by talking about the digital collages made from his specimens, drawings, and notes and my microscopy images.  I had the digital collages printed onto a polyester satin fabric by spoonflower.  The print quality was very good, and the panels are pretty large (the finished quilt is 37"h x 57"w) and I started by sandwiching the quilt and quilting the whole thing.  The quilting turned out to be nightmare unfortunately- I had a new can of spray baste and I evidently used too much because everything was constantly gunked up.  It was a mess.

Here's a shot from mid-quilting.  I really struggled to keep the straight parts of the design straight and I struggled so much with the stitching (thanks to the gunk) that I was pretty discouraged by the time I finished quilting.  The other thing was that the whole thing was really really shiny.  Usually I like things that are shiny- I love working with polyester and satiny fabrics that are shiny, but it was a poor choice for this project. In the first place, it was supposed to feel like a weathered old lab notebook which is (duh) not shiny.  Almost worse was that because a lot of the design was small and detailed, after quilting, the quilting texture (which stood out much more because the fabric was so shiny) felt like it was overpowering the design.  It was not a good experience. 

I wasn't sure initially how I wanted to finish it, but I settled on some cutwork borders for the outer edge, (I really love the way these turned out) that have shapes that were inspired by the grasses.  Narrow, solid painted brown stripes acted like sashing to separate the panels.  The brown borders and panel edges are zig-zagged on from the top, and I couched on some fun dark green sparkly line to help hide the butted up edges. 

I love the right hand border, it's one of my favorite parts of the whole piece.  I used some paint and shiva paintstick to give a little color variation to the borders and sashing so they wouldn't look so flat.

I didn't want to just have three even panels, so I made some top and bottom borders out of some green velveteen appliqued over some additional printed microscopy images.  The microscopy images are a picture of grass stem- what you see below in brown underneath the green leafy brown overlying applique.  Unfortunately the strip of brown grass stem wasn't long enough so I pieced in some turquoise and then added some paint to give it some depth.  The turquoise alone was looking pretty flat.

To help cut down on the shininess, I painted over all the panels with a coating of matte medium.  It helped some with the shininess, but you can still see a lot of the quilting texture. Normally I love that, but here I worry that it just fights with the design.

Here's the final quilt.  It turned out better than I expected given how much I struggled with it, and designing the panels and reading through my grandpa's lab notebook was a really wonderful experience.

AH  107, Range Grasses.  c. Shannon Conley, 2021, 37"x57", photo by Mike Cox

I made a special label for it with another picture of my grandparents when they were young.  That's my dad over there on the right! I'm so grateful my grandma is still with us to tell us her stories and my grandpa's.  She's gotten really good at zoom and has more recently been playing bridge online with me and some friends.  Love you grandma!

New Quilt-Range Grasses

Early this year I started working on a quilt for the SAQA call for entry called Microscape.  The call was really exciting for me, but I wasn't interested in doing another "here's a picture of something cool under the microscope".  I love making quilts like that (e.g. here and here and here and here) and I'm sure I'll make more in the future, but I was feeling like going in a little different direction. The piece that resulted didn't get into Microscape,  but making it was a wonderful process.

My grandpa Wilbur passed away in the early part of 2020 (right before COVID).  He was a great grandpa, and I shared some of his favorite things in an earlier post about a photo quilt we made for his 80th birthday in 2006.  He had many jobs over the years but I have always known him as a plant man.  He started a nursery business over forty years ago that's still in our family today and for a long time owned and ran a beautiful place with ponds where you could take your kids to fish for trout.  When I bought my first house fifteen years ago, he and my grandma gifted me three trees.  My crabapple tree from him is still very dear to me.  His homes always had beautiful landscaping filled with flowers and trees. I'll never forget calling to wish him happy birthday when he turned 90 and when I asked what he'd been doing that day he said he'd just finished mowing the lawn. 

After service in the second World War, he and my grandma and their kids moved to Las Cruces New Mexico so he could go to college at New Mexico State University.  My grandma tells tons of great stories about their time there.  I've always loved this picture of them from sometime around then.

Anyway, after my grandpa died, my grandma and my aunt asked if I would like to have his college lab notebook from his favorite class.  I had no idea he'd even saved something like that and of course I said yes.  It was just amazing,  the class was called AH 107, Range Grasses, and the book is remarkable.  It's filled with typewritten class assignments from the instructor, my grandfather's beautifully handwritten lab reports, his botanical drawings, and pages and pages of collected grass specimens.  It was amazingly well preserved, the scotch tape had yellowed a bit but almost everything was intact.  As a scientist this was a really special thing to add to my collection.  My grandpa still remembered the scientific names of all these grasses decades later, and would point them out when driving or hiking.

I knew I wanted to somehow use the lab notebook for a quilt, and I wasn't sure exactly how, but I started by taking the notebook to my lab and taking a bunch of pictures of Grandpa's grasses under the microscope.  I'm not a botanist so I'm not sure exactly what all the structures are that I could see, but they all looked really cool.  I'm still amazed that these 70 yr old specimens are so well preserved. I picked a few favorites and then started working on collaging them digitally, with pictures of the specimens, the drawings, the microscopy images, the handwritten reports, and the assignments. 

Bouteloua hirsuta (Hairy Grama)

Just look at that handwriting (!)

This is the digital collaged panel I made from the Hairy Grama assignment.

Koeleria cristata (June Grass)

And here's the digital collage from Koeleria cristata

The final one I selected was Andropogon scoparius (prairie beardgrass)

Here's the digital collage I made for this one.

After making the collages, I sent them to spoonflower to be printed onto fabric.  I'll share more about the making of the quilt later this week!