This was one of two clearly 2023 quilts that I never had a chance to blog about. It was for a call for our art quilt group 4 Common Corners. The theme was "Hidden Life" and I was super excited by that. Seemed right up my alley. Last fall was pretty chaotic and stressful though so I sort of wanted to work from something I already had.
You may recall the background from the quilt I mdae for the fierce planets call (called "Wild Thing") was this purple stretch velvet.
And for the final quilt, I cut out a large (~25" diameter) circle where the planet was stitched in. This was the final fierce planets piece to remind you.
Wild Thing, c. 2023 Shannon Conley |
Anyway, I had the pretty quilted purple circle and it felt sort of like a circular field of view inside a microscope, so it seemed like a great thing to use for my hidden life piece. I've always loved stromatolites and cyanobacteria in general, mostly because I love the idea of tiny little bacteria toiling away for billions of years oxygenating our atmosphere and paving the way for (eventually) us!
Instead of doing stromatolites this time, I picked a different type of cyanobacteria, cylindrospermum. It's a genus of filamentous cyanobacteria that form these colonial aggregates that look like little worms and can glide and move together in their aqueous environment. I quilted a bunch of overlapping colorful cylindrospermum onto the quilt using lots of different thread and couched yarn.
To give the cylindrospermums a little more weight I added some shiva paintstick inside the cells.
The filaments often have a larger bit close to the end that sort of looks like a head. It's actually called an akinete and is apparently the cell in the cylindrospermum that's the most resistant to cold weather and can overwinter in unfavorable conditions. I filled some of them with quilting,
Some of them I filled with roving, and some I filled with very old thread, sliced off a spool and then stitched down around the edge. They give it a little texture.
I faced it and put fairly stiff plastic tubing inside the facing so it would hold its shape. It has a slat across the widest part of the back and a vertical slat going top to bottom. I love the way it turned out, to me it definitely looks like a microscope field with things swimming around waiting to be visualized! And I love using up a cast off bit of something else.
Cylindrospermum, c. 2023, Shannon Conley, 24" x 24" |
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