Christmas and Winter Bag Making

 In the last couple of months I've done a little bag making in between other projects.  This is something I enjoy.  I started by making myself a new wallet.  My prior one, though much beloved, was completely worn out.  Because I'm 100% a little old lady apparently, I wanted one that had both a zip pocket and a place for my checkbook.  I made this one out of some rainbow vinyl and dinosaur fabric in my stash and it fills me with delight.

Last year sometime I found this wonderful crazy knitting fabric and fell in love with it.  I love the style of the design and the color palette was gorgeous.  I don't usually buy new fabric but I couldn't resist and snagged some of this.  I made this fairly large knitting/project tote for my knitting friend Kristin's birthday this January.  There's still enough left to make another project bag so that'll probably be on the radar at some point.

She's also a scientist so I lined it with my happy lab glassware fabric.

Finally I made this new clutch purse/wallet for my sister for Christmas.  She and my mom both really like this pattern which is from the Greenback Wallet Trio from Sew Sweetness.  I've made them several over the years,  when one wears out I just make another.  The outside is some purple cordouroy from some pants I'd worn out but had been saving for something just like this, and I couldn't help putting some more dino fabric inside.

So a fun few bags over the last few months, but probably no more for a little while, I'm trying to focus on big quilt projects while I have a little bit of time.

 The 2025 SAQA Spotlight Auction is coming up very soon!! This annual fundraiser is held in conjunction with the SAQA annual conference, this year in St. Petersburg Florida, but the auction is open to anyone.  The pieces are quite small, so it's a great way to add to your art collection!

For more information on how to participate, visit the SAQA Spotlight Auction Page.  The auction will open for bidding from March 26-April 5 on the Handbid platform.

My donation this year actually started out as part of an exercise we did with Judy Chaffee.  The idea was to pick a famous painting and break it down by color and by the amount of each major color, and then use those colors and their amounts in your own small composition.  I'm all about the gold fabrics, so I picked a Gustav Klimt painting. It was fun to try to estimate the colors and find matches in my stash. 

This is my piece for the auction that came out of the exercise. 

Here you can see my color pulls with approximate percentages and the original painting. The painting is called Judith and the Head of Holofernes and was painted by Klimt in 1901.  

It was a really fun exercise, more challenging than I thought to get the proportions of color right.  I think in the end my piece progagly has too much blue and my brown/beige is a little too dark, but otherwise ok colorwise.

The quilts start out 6x8 inches and then are matted down to 4.5 x 6.5 inches, so it will display something like this:

Don't forget to click the link above to participate!  It's a great fundraiser for a great organization.

Christmas Crafting

 I'm still getting caught up sharing the things I worked on during the end of last year during the Christmas crafting season.  

As chronic readers may know, I always make handmade ornaments for friends and family each year and this year I was inspired by a dual desire to use up some of the very pretty and sparkly but awful to knit and crochet with ribbon yarn that is in my stash and to do something with the shells I picked up when my friend Kristin and I went to Savannah.  I considered a variety of things but wound up going with a simple tassel based angel.  Each one is just a touch different but they all have the same components.

Still on the Christmas tree front, I was so excited to get this beautiful handmade spiky ornament from my sister this year for Christmas.  My mom made a bunch of these when she was first married (fifty years ago now) and I've always loved them.  It's wonderful to have a new generation of them made by my sister.

While at my sister's for Christmas day, we had a scavenger hunt for the kids to find their stockings.  One of the steps was that each family member had to build a lego gingerbread person.  I got very very excited by this and had a great time decorating mine.   I think they were designed to be tree ornaments, but I liked mine so much I know have it hanging year round on my car mirror.

Finally, I'm a big lover of nativity scenes, and I decided that my "main" one needed some dinosaurs.  I mean, I pretty much think everything benefits by the addition of dinosaurs and I feel like they would fit in well with the other nativity animals.  I ordered some paint-your-own ceramic dinosaurs from Etsy, and then as a Christmas craft project, Brett and I each painted one to add to my exisiting nativity.  They were pretty good size wise I think.

I painted the t-rex and Brett painted the brachiosaur.

I think they make great additions to the nativity.  The dinosaurs came in a set of six, so we'll paint two more next year.  It's really an eclectic assembled set.  The base set and hut were a gift from my mom when I got my very first apartment about 25 years ago.  And of course the dinosaurs were just added this year.  But the three angels are much much older.  They belonged to my great grandmother.  She was married in 1926, and while I have no specific info on these pieces, my guess is that they come from sometime in the mid twentieth century, 1930-1950 maybe?  Maybe next year I'll see if I can find amy makers marks or anything on them.  In any case all together it's pretty special to me.  Happy (very late) Christmas!

Miscellaneous knitting and crochet

 Having now past both Christmas and Valentine's day I thought I'd share a bunch of knit and crochet projects from the last 4-5 months.  Some of them were gifts and some not, but I'd never had a chance to blog about any of them.

First up are these ankle socks.  This pair of ankle socks uses leftover yarn from two other pairs.  I wanted to do something different for the cuff so I followed this cute short row petal pattern I found in a sock knitting book.  Unfortunately I thought I had the pattern memorized and sort of screwed myself up for the bind off but they came out cute.

These socks were for my mom, I actually knit them for her a couple of years ago but I used crappy yarn for the heels and it had worn through.  Therewasn't really much point to mending them, so I took them apart and knit new heels and a cuff.  I gave them back to her and hope she can wear them.  And the moral of the story is never knit socks with anything except sock yarn.

This year I also really committed to learning colorwork.  I started by working on a colorwork tote bag but transitioned away from that (a WIP I'll get back to at some point) to start on some hats as presents.  A couple of years ago my mom gave me the knitting the national parks book which has colorwork hat patterns for each national park.

I started out by making the Yellowstone one as a Christmas present for my friend Brett and the Saguaro National Park one for my friend Melody.  Doing those two colorwork projects helped me build my skills.  I'm still not great at it, but I'm currently knitting a colorwork sweather with fingering weight yarn so I'm still getting better!

Brett also wanted a resistance hat, so I also knit him this pink pussy hat.  He should have a warm head all winter.   In the top hat picture you can actually see one of my crafty Christmas presents from my mom, she pieced and quilted me a table runner with little red priuses carrying christmas trees!  For years every Thanksgiving I'd cut a Christmas tree in New Mexico and tie it to the top of my prius and drive it back the 500 miles to Oklahoma.  There were a few touch and go trips in there including one memorable time it almost blew off the side and a kind man at a gas station had to help me re-secure it.  I still get a tree in New Mexico each Thanksgiving but my Subaru is long enough the tree can fit inside.

My brother-in-law really likes turtles so my sister crocheted him this one.  I'd seen some cute turtle costumes online so I thought I'd make a tank costume for the turtle since my brother-in-law is also a historical artillery enthusiast.  I didn't have a pattern, just sort of made it up as I went along, so the proportions are a bit off but I think he came out cute.

My good friend Carolyn also likes turtles and Brett bought her this one from a local craft fair.  I crocheted it a stegosaurus costume because everyone needs a dinosaur costume.  He also looks a little like a spiny koopa from Mario, but adorable all the same.

Finally, for this year's family valentines I crocheted everyone hearts.  I sort of made these up as I went along too- kind of a modified granny square based on a picture of one I saw online.  It was a fun way to use up some scrap yarn.

After all that, there won't be any more small projects for a while now.  I have to focus all my limited knitting time on my dinosaur colorwork sweater!  I expect it will take quite a long time to finish.

2024 Wrap-Up

 How far into 2025 is it still ok to do a 2024 Wrap-Up post?  I'm still not finished blogging about the 2024 quilts, but here we go anyway with the wrap-up.

The first half of 2024 was spent working on getting ready for my the Synthesis: Mixed Media show at the NM State Capitol, but after that deadline had passed I was able to work on a larger variety of things.  Very happily I completed one of my liturgical manuscript quilts as well as got a good start on another one (will be a 2025 finish), that series is so close to my heart.

This first group are the ones for Synthesis

C. Bauri, Feathers or Scales

Hondo Valley Iris

These first two sold, so that's nice.

Origami 1

Origami 2

Those two were also made for the show at the Capitol last summer even though I didn't get to blogging about them until just a couple of weeks ago.

Tumbling Blocks

Tumbling blocks was also originally made for the Capitol show, but I wound up not displaying it there in lieu of entering it into something else (which it didn't get into).

After finishing the things for the Capitol, I worked on other stuff.

Chinle Formation

Chinle Formation was my entry for 4 Common Corners Rocks!

Galaxies, Suns, and the Planets in their Courses

This one was for 4 Common Corners Improv and I love how it turned out.

Summer in Lincoln County, 2024

This one was made for the SAQA Primal Forces: Fire but didn't get in.

Homecoming

North Eagle Creek

These two were made for the SAQA regional Exhibition Living Language Land-Inspired.

All Good Gifts

This was by far my favorite quilt of 2024, another in my series of liturgical pieces.  Another one should be coming up as the first finish of 2025.

So quite a few quilts in 2024, but most small and/or fairly quick pieces for the Capitol show.  The next Capitol show will be in 2026, so I have a little time in 2025 to work on some slow projects just for me and I'm looking forward to that.

New Quilt: Tumbling Blocks

 I have previously made a couple of 3D quilts using quilted triangles (for example here and here) and I really enjoyed those as a way to use up quilted scraps and do some sculptural things.  Last year I was looking for a way to expand that general idea. The idea of doing actual tumbling blocks jumped out at me,  not the appearance of tumbling blocks but 3D ones made from squares.

I started with the same quilted cast-offs as for the prior projects.  Some of these are tes quilt sandwiches, some are projects I didn't care for that got cut up, but most come from the edges of quilts I cut off during the squaring up process.  I pieced them together by abutting and zig zagging the edges if they weren't quite big enough.

After getting together a bunch of squares, I started assembling them into these three square units, trying to have a light, medium, and dark in each unit.  Of course it's 100% scrappy, so some units had more contrast than others.

I sewed them all together into an overall diamond shape, but the whole thing was extremely soft and floppy so I knew it needed some support.  My sister and her husband purchased a new mattress and I'd saved the old one (it was foam) because I figured it would come in useful for something.  Apart from making a few dog beds, most of it was just sitting in my garage.  Using an electric carving knife I hacked it into cube shapes as best I could and used fabric glue to attach them to the back of the quilt.  That provided plenty of support but was pretty ugly, so I stitched pink fabric over the whole thing and then mounted it on the hanging frame.

Unfortunately, the edges were still really floppy, so I stiffened them using GAC400 Fabric stiffener.  The cardboard and clamps below are to help the edges hold their shape while they dry.

Here's the final piece a little from the side and then square on below.  It's fairly large, 70" x 44' x 6".  I'd originally made it for the 2024 NM State Capitol Mixed Media show, but decided to pull it at the last minute to enter into Quilt National.  I'm not surprised it didn't get in though,  this is an idea that I was and am really excited about, but I think the execution on this one could be improved going forward.  I do really love the scrappiness and using up all those bits that were leftover, it's just not quite even enough for my tastes.

Tumbling Blocks, c. 2024 Shannon Conley

Tumbling Blocks, c. 2024 Shannon Conley