I Like #246

 Welcome to another week of things to like! 

We're having an ice storm right now, but luckily so far there haven't been widespread power outages in our area which is great.  Of course ice storms mean work-from-home, and that comes along with dogs-snoozing-by-the-desk.  I love when they're calm.

I had a lovely weekend in Dallas with my sister's family,  that meant lots of playing with the kids, including a new-to-me game that I fell in love with called Azul.   It's a pretty game with easy to pick up game play and plenty of strategy to keep you engaged.  SO fun to see them all.  Of course a visit to see them wouldn't be complete without the guinea pigs and we had fun playing with them too.  Here's Coconut enjoying a lettuce.

I'm sewing on some organza leaves for a new project, I had to enclose my quilting setup in the dog playpen because Spooky kept rushing under and stepping on my foot pedal.  It was quite scary a couple times when he stood on it while I was maneuvering the fabric near the needle so he's been banished from that specific area.

I've been working on my bejeweled pincushion embroidery-along with Mary Corbett.  It's a good low-stress project, but we're coming up on the beading part and I have to find somewhere local to buy the beads because everything in my stash is too big.

Spooky is color coordinated to the chair he is currently chewing up.  It's one I got at a garage sale, so I'm not overly concerned, but he's been running around with these bits of ruffle that match his fur.  

I blogged this week about my new boxelder bug quilt, and last week about my two SAQA auction donation quilts (also using remnants from the boxelder bug project), and it was fun to share about those.  Click through to see more about each of those projects.

I hope you guys are finding good things in this still wintery time!  Click over to LeeAnna's for more things to like!

Boxelder Bugs: Finished

 Earlier this week I blogged about the assembly stage of my Boxelder bug quilt, and today I'm back to talk about the quilting and the finished piece.  

The quilt sandwich has black lace for the backing (I was just trying to use it up out of my Thank-You-Georgia stash), wool batting, the bug layer, and then the layer of black tulle.  I accidentally realized the hard way that the black tool was VERY melty.  Luckily after melting a hole in it while trying to go back and re-fuse a floppy bug leg I still had a big enough piece to use a big section with no hole, but after that there was absolutely no more ironing.

I quilted around and between each bug with echo quilting using purple variegated thread on the grey side and grey variegated thread on the purple side.  Around the outer edge I used a bright red thread to pick up the red bugs.  Spooky was very anxious to help (NOT ACTUALLY HELP) with both the quilting and the edge finishing.  The edges are finished with couched fuzzy yarn from my stash (thanks Georgia!) that matched the color of the quilt top.

Here's the finished quilt, I love all the creepy crawly bugs and the ones that go off in weird directions and the ones that won't stay in line.  I tried to make sure that they had all their appendages (I mentioned in the last post that the legs and antennae were very prone to breaking off).  However there are a few missing a leg or antenna or eye, and it's kind of fun to go searching for them.

Boxelder Bug #3, c. 2022 Shannon Conley, 47" x 32"

Here are a few close ups so you can see the bugs and the quilting a little better.

For me this was a fun, lighthearted piece to start off the new year.  Just what I needed. Do you guys have any fun projects on the horizon?

New Quilt: Boxelder Bugs

 

The current call theme for our art quilt group 4 Common Corners is "The Way We Were."  Our members are taking all kinds of interpretations of the theme.  I originally thought about making another in my series of New Mexico high desert inspired pieces, but I've done a lot of those, and I was really feeling in the mood for something bold and graphic.  For some reason the idea of boxelder bugs just popped into my head and I decided to run with it. These harmless little black and red bugs are just completely endemic where I grew up. It's weird actually because I don't think we really have boxelder trees which is what they're named for.  In any case, they are all over the place and you quickly learn to just ignore them.  Just this fall I had a couple fall on my head while getting my parents' Christmas lights hung up, and occasionally you will have one drop in your coffee or something.  They congregate by the hundreds in the clerestory windows in my parents' pool room and in their kitchen window.  They've become an indelible (if unlikely) part of what makes me me, and what makes home home.  And I figured they'd make a fun, cheeky sort of quilt.  

I used my silhouette cutter to cut out the dark bug bodies out of fusible-backed black and dark purple silk.

I also used the cutter to cut out the red accent shapes.  I used a variety of reds and dark pinks, including some of my handpainted fabrics to give some color variety.  The cutter did fantastic with regards to cutting the teeny legs (each bug is about 4-5" long but the legs are very skinny).  However, when I peeled them off the sticky mat, lots of the legs and antennae broke.  You can see some with missing or broken legs in the picture below.

I cut out about 60ish bugs altogether; it was fun to have them piling up in my studio.

I decided I wanted some of the bugs on a dark background and some on a light background, so I pieced together this piece of grey polyester dress lining with two layers of light lilac organza.  The organza was fine (if a bit slippery) but the grey fabric shrank when it was ironed (which was less than ideal since the bugs were fusible).  I tried to iron it to pre-shrink before sewing it together to the purple and it worked ok.  After that it was just a matter of laying out the bugs!

I knew that with the skinniness and brokenness of the bug legs I'd need to cover the whole thing with a layer of tulle, so I auditioned several different colors.  For perhaps the first time ever, I decided that the maroon tulle made the whole thing too pink (you can see it draped over the top of the quilt in the picture below), so I went with the black tulle (draped over the bottom half).

Come back later this week to see the quilting and the finished piece.

I Like #245

 I don't want to miss a week, but we have so much work craziness.  So I'll just drop in to say that my two pups and their pup friend Cash are the things to like this week.  I hope everyone is hanging in there.

SAQA Auction Quilts

 My first new quilt of this year features a bunch of boxelder bugs crawling all over it.  It's for one of the calls for our art quilt group 4 Common Corners, and I'll blog about it separately.  But in the process of cutting out the bugs using my silhouette cutter, I realized that I had all these "bug frames" leftover after I peeled out the fabric bug shapes.  You can see the cut lines in the picture below.

I didn't want to waste the frame bits, especially since they cut fairly cleanly, so I grabbed a couple of them and decided to use them for my annual SAQA auction quilts.  Every spring, SAQA invites people to submit a very small quilt (6" x 8") to their Spotlight Auction which is held in conjunction with the annual conference.  And then in the fall, we all submit 12" x 12" quilts for the annual benefit auction.

The bugs and frames were backed with fusible so I grabbed the frames and fused them down to some handpainted pinkish orange fabric leftover from my Glycocalyx project and started to "decorate".  The auction quilts are always a fun time to play with interesting stuff so I got out my iron-on fusible foil, and my markers and paint pens.  My mom gave me some of the foil while I was home and she was de-stashing.  I added it to my existing foil collection and in the process was prompted to use it.  I haven't done any foiling in many years, not since making some small Christmas light tree quilts back in 2014 and 2016. It was fun to use, and I love the shiny reflectiveness of the foil.  It's hard to see in the pictures, but the gold and teal are foil.

These also served as the first "art quilts" I quilted on my new sit-down longarm.  The quilting went really smoothly, and I even quilted the backgrounds with metallic thread which is always tricky.

This is the finished 12x12.

And this is the finished quilt for the Spotlight Auction.  Again, it's very small (6x8), really just like a slightly oversized postcard.

Each of the bugs is quilted slightly differently, and it was so fun to make them.  It had been a long time since I had fun quilting and sewing so these were a delight to work on.  The bug shapes were a great blank slate for doodling with color and quilting.

Sometime soon I'll be sharing what I did with the actual bugs.  Have you made any bug or spider or creepy crawly quilts?

I Like #244

It's been a challenging week here.  

We had a snowstorm and that resulted in three work-from-home days and even though I went in for a few hours on two of those days, it was wonderful to stay home where things were quiet.  I got to spend time with the dogs which was great. 

Unfortunately after doing better for a couple of months after a decline at Thanksgiving, Bentley went downhill very rapidly on Saturday.  He was extremely lethargic and barely responded to anything, and then at about 10:30 Saturday night he started showing signs of extreme respiratory distress.  Then he sort of passed out and stopped breathing and got stiff before gasping and starting to breathe again.  I got him into the car and his breathing had stabilized some by the time we got to the emergency vet.  The staff there were wonderfully kind, but they were slammed and after verifying that he was stable, it was two hours before I got to see the vet.

It turned out Bentley had fluid/blood in the pericardial space (inside the membrane that encloses the heart) and that was causing his heart to beat poorly and not deliver oxygen well to his tissues.  The prognosis for the associated intervention/surgery (which is very invasive) is not good for dogs as old as he is, and I made the painful decision to let him go.  The staff were very supportive, but it is always heartbreaking to lose them.  I got to be with him until the end.

We adopted him in 2010 from our then vet whose daughter had rescued him after he got hit by a car.  They said he was about 18 months old then, so I've always thought he was probably born in early 2009, making him just exactly 13 now.  

He's been an old dog for a long time, longer than a lot of dogs because of his blindness and neurological disorder, but up until Saturday he was always excited to see you, excited to have pets and snuggles, and excited to wander around outside smelling things, barking at stuff (or barking at non-stuff), and having short walks. 

This one was from just last week as I snuggled him.

And these are from when I first got him!  He was definitely still a puppy and did his share of eating furniture and wreaking havoc.

Last fall with Spooky and Blue

Snuggling with my mom

He and Bullett used to love to get up on the table and howl at the Saturday Tornado Siren test.

And here he is with Bullett, Missy, and Shooter.  It's so hard to see these pictures, Bullet and Missy are both gone too.  Shooter (the upside down girl)  is still going strong, but she's starting to get old too.

He loved playing tug-of-war and if you let him, he'd play until his mouth bled (we did not let him).

I loved this picture so much I used it for my Bentley quilt a few years ago.

Before the weekend, I had a chance to sort through some things and finish some things up which was good.  I finished this baby quilt, it was one I quickly made over Christmas to use as a practice quilt on my new sewing machine.  Not sure who it will be for, but some new baby will come along I'm sure!

I worked on my boxelder bug quilt, and hopefully I can blog about that in the next few weeks.  

My mother of thousands plant is blooming; it has these delicate pink flowers which brighten up the cold winter light.  

I'm following along with the Bee-Jeweled Pincushion stitch-along over at NeedleNThread, so I worked on that project a little this weekend too.

Mostly right now I'm just sad.  But that's ok, and I'll get through it.  For things to cheer you up in our online community, click over to LeeAnna's.