New Quilt: Hidden Life

 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"