The second call this year for our art quilt group 4 Common Corners was "Improv at the Corners". I was initially struggling with this, I don't really do traditional "improv" but settled into it as an opportunity to explore something I'd been thinking a lot about, namely what to do with the "outer edges" that are left over after cutting shapes out with my digital cutter.
I make quite a few quilts that use the digital cutter to cut out fusible applique shapes, and I'm always left with all these scraps that are tiny, weirdly shaped, and have fusible on them. But often they're some of my favorite hand dyed or painted fabrics so I hate to toss them. The net result is that I have several large baskets of these scraps and I decided to use some in this project. As with most scrap projects, after doing the whole project you can't even tell that I used up any (based on how many are still left), so maybe this is motivation to do another one (or two or three) of these.
I selected a bright blue shiny background fabric and sketched out only the broadest sort of shapes. I was inspired by the shapes of nebulae in the night sky, but only very very loosely.
Here are a couple of in-progress pictures. Each main element (whether coral or teal) was surrounded by a band of dark navy bits, and then I filled in the background with gold bits. I wind up with a fair amount of gold because a lot of the precision cutting is for my illuminated manuscript series and I use a lot of gold in that.
A lot of the red and coral bits came from my boxelder bug quilts, so there are a lot of antennae and bug shaped outlines in there.
The blues and corals are from a wider range of projects, but a lot of them are from my original mammal mandala from 2014. You can see lots of outlines but also a possum and some possum babies that didn't make it into the original quilt.
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| Galaxies, Suns, and the Planets in their Courses, c. Shannon Conley, 2024, 31x31" |
That's pretty trippy! Scrap projects are so much fun. :-)
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