I Like #255

 Welcome to another week of things to like!

This has been a week of catching up on the home front which has been great.

I blogged about a quilt I finished a few weeks ago, you can more about it here. 

I was also pleased to have two pieces in shows that opened in Colorado this week.  My piece Cloud Rim: Summer 1991 is part of Evolutions at the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum in Golden, and luckily my mom was able to attend the opening reception and two of our friends (pictured with mom below), Diana Fox and Bev Haring won big awards (CONGRATS!!!!!!!).

This is my mom with her piece

Mom and I also had pieces in the invitational show Slopes, Shapes, and Landscapes at the Lincoln Center in Fort Collins, and Mom was able to go by and see it too.  Both of these will be hanging for the next couple of months, so if you're in the area, stop in an check them out.

My piece, Topography II: Crest trail is there in the middle of that wall below.

That's one of my mom's quilts above on the left, and all three of the quilts below are hers.  She had quite a few pieces in the show.  I only had one, but I don't make identifiable landscapes all that often.

Lots of things are blooming, these small poppy things are outside my building at work.

In my garden the dahlias are just starting to come up, but my petunias are doing great.  Such a blast of bright color.

I got my garage cleaned out this week; in theory I'm supposed to be getting my car back sometime soon and we're in the middle of storm season so I needed to be able to get both my car and my mom's car in my garage until I can get her car back to her.

The boys are doing well, I did a fair amount of knitting this week and they both wanted me to stop and play.

I hope you're all having good things in your lives this week.  Click over to LeeAnna's for more things to like!

New Quilt: Alleluia Alleluia

A couple months ago, while I was working on some more complicated quilt designs I decided to start something simpler so I could just have something to sew on.  It was right around the time when I was really trying to get used to my new longarm so a lot of quilting was appealing to me.  

I started it right at the time when Russia invaded Ukraine, and it was so heartbreaking (it's still heartbreaking), and I wanted to try to do something colorful and hopeful.  I decided to start with the phrase we use as our dismissal in church, which seemed fitting since going into the world in peace seemed like something we needed. 

After drafting the pattern, I pinned it down to a quilt sandwich and stitched around the letters in light grey thread.  You can see in the picture below, the very light thread outlining the word And between love and serve.  After outline stitching the words, I tore off the pattern and started quilting.  Instead of regular quilting, I decided to try out free-motion couching using some of my stash yarn.  It was so much fun and worked really well with the free-motion couching foot on my machine.  All the freedom of free-motion quilting but with the bright thick line of color you'd usually associated with fabric and paint.

The color story was largely dictated by the yarn I had on hand, but you'll notice the same blue and yellow we've been seeing all over recently.  After doing the letters I started outlining them and then just kept filling in.  I didn't really care about the color of the background fabric since I planned to cover the whole thing with yarn.

You can actually see in the picture on the left that there's a bunch of regular quilting along the left side; that's because this started out as a big practice quilt sandwich that I decided to use for a real quilt!

After steadily filling and filling and filling until it was all covered, here's the final piece. The edges were finished with zig-zagged couched yarn.  It took a long time to fill in the background, but it was very restful.  Easy to quilt on for 20 or 30 minutes at a time.  All the extra yarn makes it fairly heavy, heavier than you'd think from the size of it (it's 39" x 25")

Here are a few closeups.

Alleluia, Alleluia, c. 2022 Shannon Conley

I really enjoyed this couching process and I'll probably use it again in future.  And now this slightly psychedelic quilt can take its place in my series of liturgical quilts.

I Like #254

 Welcome to another week of things to like!

Before I start, I wanted to say I just realized that the service that usually emails me when I have blog comments hasn't been working for the past couple of months!  I thought I just hadn't been getting any comments but it turns out the notifications just weren't working!  I came to the actual blog for some reason the other day and saw several, and now I feel terrible for not having responded!  Thanks to everyone who has been commenting and I'll check now on the blog so I can reply to you all until I get this sorted out.

This was a crazy week, last Tuesday we learned that there was a huge forest fire right in my parent's town, so all week through until Easter we were in a constant state of worry about them and their community.  Finally over the weekend they started being able to get it contained, but it was devastating for so many (two fatalities and 200 homes lost).  It was a blessing that my parents were safe and did not have to evacuate.  We heard harrowing stories of those evacuating from Gavilan canyon (where the fire was the worst), truly racing for their lives.

Thursday was Maundy Thursday so as part of our Holy Week celebrations we had wonderful church services on Thursday and Friday, culminating in the beautiful Easter Vigil Saturday night and then the joyful Easter morning celebrations on Sunday.   I love Easter and the Easter celebrations at our church.  We always have a big reception on Easter Sunday morning, so I made a bunch of tasty Easter cookies.  I love the chance to get out and use (after polishing) my big silver serving tray since it doesn't get used for anything else.

And then to follow up on the chaos, on Sunday afternoon I drove to Albuquerque (about 8 hours), stayed overnight with some dear family friends, and then got up Monday morning to drive to Santa Fe where I had to drop off eleven pieces of my artwork for a show at the New Mexico State Capitol.   The show had been put of for two years due to COVID so I'm so excited it's finally opening. The show is a mixed media show with about seven or eight artists.  There's so much cool stuff. My car was very full!

These amazing honeycomb pieces are by Stephanie Lerma.  They're so cool in person.

It was wonderful to see good friends Gale Oppenheim and Betty Busby- Betty is the one who organized this exhibition.

I had to leave before the installation was finished, but hopefully next week I can share some pictures of the final show.

The Capitol is a beautiful building and had lovely blooming trees all around it!

After dropping the work off, I rushed over to another friend's house because I had a three hour zoom meeting before I had to drive back to OKC.  She has four small dogs that were delightful companions during the meeting.  Sadly I only got pictures with two of them.

And of course, mine were excited to see me when I got home,  I just love how angelic Spooky looks here.  In case anyone is wondering, he is not actually angelic at all. They're both currently a little miffed at me because I gave them baths Tuesday night.

As a final thing, this week I blogged about a small embroidery project I recently finished, click
here to read about it:

I hope everyone who celebrates had a special and meaningful Easter and for more things to like, just click over to LeeAnna's!

Embroidered Pincushion

 I really enjoy hand embroidery, but I don't particularly like doing big embroidery projects; I tend to save my "big project energy" for art quilts.  But I love having a small embroidery project going at any given time, and one of my favorite embroidery blogs is run by Mary Corbett over at Needle N Thread.  She's been running a series of small stitch-along projects.  They're great because she walks through each step, and then the project finishes into something useful.  

Recently she led a stitch-along to make a bejeweled beaded pincushion.  You can see all the posts about the project here.  Mary sold kits for the project but I wanted to use things I had on hand so I sort of adapted it a little for my materials.

The main embroidery is on the side panel that wraps around the pincushion with a little additional fun hexagonal stitching along the top.  I had to put it in a fairly large hoop because the part that wraps around the pincushion is pretty wide and because it's beaded you can't really move the hoop.  Someday maybe I'll invest in a nice rectangular frame, but not just now.

I love Mary's stitch tutorials, she provides so many details so it's easy to learn how to do the stitches properly.  I don't always manage it, but it's not for lack of instruction.   

After stitching all the stems, I stitched a few thread flowers and then started stitching the beads.  I haven't done much beading before so that was one of the things I liked about this project. I had wanted to use all supplies I had on hand, but the project called for tiny 11/0 seed beads.  I have a variety of 15/0 seed beads, but they really looked too big on here.  I found a great local bead store and picked up a couple of different shades of blue and pink beads.

After assembling the pincushion, there is a row of palestrina stitch around the top and bottom edge.  That was a new stitch to me and it was wonderful to have instructions for both left and right handed stitchers.  The palestrina stitch was fun and it was good to have a chance to practice it. 

I love the way it turned out.  I took it slowly, stitching on it a little here and there when I had time, and it was fun to have it finish into something I think is so pretty at the end.  I assembled it a little differently than in the instructions because I wanted to stuff it with walnut shell crumbles.  It has a piece of matboard inside the base which makes it nice and sturdy feeling.

It feels a little old-fashioned in a delightful way.  It was a great low-stress enjoyable project.  If you like embroidery, I recommend you follow Needle N Thread.

I Like #253

 Welcome to another week of things to like!

Very scary news first though,  my parents' town, Ruidoso New Mexico is having a big wildfire right in the middle of town right now.  My parents are safe now and the fire is largely moving away from them but several thousand people have been evacuated and current estimates are that ~150 homes have burned down, including some belonging to friends of theirs.  It's so scary, and there are other similar fires burning in other parts of New Mexico right now too.  Please keep them in your thoughts, it's been so windy and dry.

I finished Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson this week and I thought it was very good.  Definitely recommend to anyone who is a fan of his writing. 

I don't get new music very often, but I did buy Brandi Carlile's newish (2021) album this week, In these Silent Days.  It's great,  I love her music.

In sorting through my phone pictures this week, I realized I have a couple of yummy small projects I finished in the last few weeks that I forgot to share!  

One is this small birthday banner I made for my Grandma who turned 93 in late March.  Love you Grandma!!  I'd been playing around a bunch with couching yarn on my longarm, so it was fun to do a small piece.  

I also made a small bag for my new laptop a little while back.  So far I'm not too pleased with the laptop but I like the bag.  It's made out of rainbow glitter vinyl and the inside is lined with this super fun rainbow lab glassware fabric.  It was very tough to turn, but I think it cam out nice.

I got a bunch of science stickers recently, and my very favorite was this adorable mole-in-a-beaker.  

The pups are doing fine, Spooky took the outer cover off the green dog bed, and then made blue sit on the empty cover while he sat on the inner cover (that was still filled with comfy dog bed).

So far my garden is doing absolutely zilch apart from the petunias (which fill in so nicely), but the dahlia seeds I started are doing well!  Here in a little while I'll plant them in the ground outside.

I hope everyone is hanging in there!  Click over to LeeAnna's for more things to like!