I Like #318

 Welcome to another week of things to like!

The weather here has been lovely which is a great boon after the hot summer.  My garden has been loving it.  In addition to continuing to cut flowers, the ones in the garden are really lovely too.  And I saw this great butterfly enjoying the space this week.

I had all my lab members over for dinner this weekend to celebrate getting a grant submitted, fingers crossed that it gets funded.  But it was fun to have everyone over and I made my mom's yummy chimichanga recipe.  I love it but it makes tons and tons so I only ever make it when there's a party.  This is the meat cooking.

Spooky and Blue loved the party, they each got to come out in turn and have lots of attention.

And Cash and Brett came over this week too which of course Spooky loved.

I'm headed to an retreat in Phoenix this week with my art quilting group 4 Common Corners (I'm really looking forward to it).  In preparation, I made a new notions pouch for traveling.  You might wonder whether I needed a new pouch/bag, and the objective answer is of course not.  But I'd been seeing this quicky flat circular, folds-into-a-taco bag on instagram so I had to try it.  Of course I modified it to have an internal zip pocket and changed the finishing a bit. 

here's what the inside looks like laid flat.  I love that acid green print with the rainbow circles and I've never had anything great to do with it.  The little teal felt circle is for needles and pins since I wanted to be able to use it for notions.  The whole thing is about 10.5" in diameter.

Here you can see how it looksin the process of being closed up.  It folds and zips up like a taco!

One of the things I wanted to do with this project was use up some of the leather scraps in my studio, so as a final step I added this red and silver leather to the outside.  It coordinates better than you might think with the inside.  I used the red and silver together because I only had scraps and needed to piece.  It's fun to finally use some of these leather scraps and now I have a nice new pouch!  I love pouches with fun or clever geometry or closures.

Finally, I blogged this week about another project I finished this summer for a SAQA entry called Fierce Planets.  Sadly, I didn't get into the show, but you can read about the quilt here, here, and here!

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

Fierce Planets- Finished

 When I left off yesterday, I had cut off a bunch of the purple background on my Fierce Planets quilt and decided I hated it.  Of course.  Big sigh.  I had turned and finished all the edges using a bunch of bias tape that had been kindly destashed to me (thanks Mary Alice), and there really was no easy way to add the background back on.  But I really wanted it back so I decided to do a sort of open work approach.  To add some movement to the piece, like a big planet explosion.  I laid it out and drafted some new edges for each little piece.

I finished all the new edges.

Then using my dissolvable floriani stabilizer I quilted across the individual pieces using monofilament thread.  Of course I don't have any pictures of that (facepalm).  After stitching well across all the pieces, I dissolved the stabilizer and blocked it out.  

Here's the final piece,  named "Wild Thing".  It wound up finishing at 43" x 64".  The artist statement reads: "The axis of rotation of Uranus is tilted over 90 degrees from its revolution axis, and its magnetic axis also has a large tilt relative to its rotation axis. I imagine Uranus as the crazy bouncy child, the one who brings chaos wherever she goes; the one who breaks all the rules and succeeds anyway. She is someone who opens our eyes to all the weird and wonderful different ways things can be."

Wild Thing, c. 2023, Shannon Conley

This one was like pulling teeth, but I got it done and am generally pleased with the outcome.

Fierce Planets Continued

 Earlier this week I shared the first steps in my quilt for the Fierce Planets called.  I got this far and thought I was almost done but something about the composition was bothering me.  

I wasn't even sure exactly what it was that was bugging me.  If it was the colors, the way the planet and the background joined together (or didn't join well) or what.  I had strategizing sessions with my mom and several fiber friends.  Lots of different opinions and very helpful suggestions.  My mom thought it looked like pac-man and not planety, but I didn't have a good way to change the lines inside the planet.  I tried it upside down to see if it would look less pac-many, but that just looked completely wrong to me, and I finally decided I actually really liked the face that had inadvertently emerged and was not bothered by the pac-man quality.  Mom also suggested the orange stripes might be a little too bright for the rest of everything so I overpainted it and liked it better a little duller.

I also decided that the background was a little plain, so I used my shiva paintsticks to add a bunch of shading and space-y shapes to the background as well as a halo around the planet.  I liked that, but I still wasn't sure about the composition.

I started mocking up a bunch of different potential options on the computer.  This was what it would have looked like without the background, 

As an oval final shape.

With a little bit of background and a round finish.

Squared up?

I even tried some really weird ideas.

None of those were doing it for me.  I think the one I liked the best was the round one, but I didn't want to lose my big radiating lines.  So I did another mockup, decided I liked it and cut off all the background down to this.  And then immediately hated it.  I missed all my purple background!!!  This felt like a real struggle.  Come back later in the week to see how I resolved it!

New Quilt: Fierce Planets

 SAQA recently had a call for entry in collaboration with John's Hopkins University and planetary scientist Dr. Sabine Stanley called Fierce Planets.  I was super excited by the call, after all I love nerdy sciency things, but was fairly late getting my piece started. 

My central idea was to do something inspired by the strange magnetic fields of uranus.   Normally, the magnetic axis of a planet is fairly close to the rotational axis, and the rotational axis is approximately perpindicular to the plane of the solar system (i.e. the plane the planet orbits the sun).  However, Uranus is doubly weird- it's rotational axis is pretty close to parallel to the plane of the solar system, and it's magnetic axis is really off from the rotational axis.  As a result, the magnetic fields of Uranus are really weird and different from other planets that have been studied.  Scientists don't really know why it's like that and whether that reflects something different about how it got it's magnetic fields.

Anyway, I envisioned a planet like shape covered with lines going in weird directions reflecting the magnetic fields of Uranus floating in a field of space with large lines denoting the magnetic pole, rotational axis, and the plane of the solar system.

I started as always by painting fabric.  This piece was for my space background,  it started as a medium purple stretch velvet and I added on some grey silver splotches and additional dark blue paint to give a dark starry night sky vibe.

I painted this piece of pink velvet to use in my magnetic field structures.

For the background of the planet I used this piece of fabric I had tried flour paste printing on while at my mom's last summer.  I'd wanted to do a handwritten prayer inside the cross but I'd never tried flour paste printing. That first picture is after I'd put on the flour paste, written my words in the wet paste, and then let it dry and painted.  Unfortuantely, when I removed all the flour paste, there were cool crackly lines and color (the next picture) but no words.  So I decided to use the piece for the base of my planet.

I didn't take nearly as many pictures as usual while I was building the planet.  Each of the magnetic field lines (below) were made by sewing strips of fabric into long triangular tubes and then stuffing them with thick cording that was destashed into my studio by my friend Gale (thanks Gale!).  I stitched the triangular chunks down onto the background fabric in patterns I thought were interesting.  Each triangular tube is about 1-1.25 inches high, just to give an idea of scale.

On the background fabric I couched a bunch of heavy weight variegated orange and yellow yarn to be my axis lines.

Here's the background piece during the quilting process.

Here it is after I finished quilting and added some more radiating lines (they're all couched yarn).  The planet is mounted in a hole cut un the purple background with purple trim stitched down on top over the seam.

I was really struggling with the overall composition, come back later this week to see the craziness my brain went through.