New Quilt: Our Service Begins on P. 355

As I've talked about many times over the years, I've been working on a series of liturgical quilts inspired by the Episcopal worship services since 2013.  Most of them are aesthetically inspired by illuminated manuscripts, but a couple of them are fairly different, stylistically.  A couple of years ago I made this one, which has a super bright, fun, almost 60s vibe.  It's made of couched yar which covers the whole surface (no fabric is visible, all yarn).  It was a really fun way to doodle quilt and use up small bits of yarn I was unlikely to use for other projects, both of which made me happy.

Since this one was so stylistically different from the others in the series, I wanted to make sure there was at least one more like it, so that it didn't feel like an outlier when the group hung together.  The text in the quilt above comes at the very end of our worship service so I thought it might be fun to bookend the series with one like this that includes the opening text of the worship service.

To make these, I start by basting the fabric and then free-motion quilting the outline of the letters using a paper pattern I make, print out, and pin to the top.  If you look really closely below you can see a few tiny bits of leftover paper I didn't quite get removed yet.  

In this quilt I had two sets of overlapping letters, one for the opening acclamation (in blue/teal) and one for the congregational response (in pink).  Where thye overlap I couched purple yarn.  Because it made a lot of complex shapes, I just marked each one (pink/blue/purple) with my washable markers before couching so I could keep everything straight.

You can see here as it was in progress a lot of the traveling lines between letters,  one of the things I like about this technique is that it is so forgiving.  All of those traveling yarns are just naturally covered up when you quilt in the background.

I quilted in the background around the letters with the same leftover pale yellow-cream yarn I used around the Go in Peace letters from the first quilt!

 

Here's the final thing,  after finishing the letters I quilted in the remaining background in a free doodle pattern.  The yarns were chosen mostly to help use up small bits of things leftover.  I also wanted to pick some colors for the border that sort of balanced out the pink/blue baby quilt feel that I was getting from just the letters.  I love the pink and teal and I picked them for the letters because I had enough of coordinating pinks and teals to do all the letters, but it was feeling a little saccharine at the stage shown above.

In addition to yarn, I couched down some wonderful bits of hand dyed sheep locs that I bought a few years ago at a fiber festival and never used.  they give some extra fun texture when you get close up.

If you look closely at the pink yarn, it's sort of two-tone,  that yarn was originally two giant cones of very thin pink yarn, one fairly pale pink and one more a hot pink that my friend Georgia gave me.  They were too thin to couch alone, but my other friend Melody (who is a spinner) plied a bunch together for me and it was perfect!!  I've just 3D printed myself a spindle so I can do some more plying,  I have a bunch of great colors of really thin yarn from Georgia and I'd love to use it for future projects like this.

Our service begins on P. 355, c. Shannon Conley, 2025

The title, "Our service begins on P. 355" is a cheeky reference to the fact that while the opening words of the Rite II Sunday liturgy are in fact the ones on the quilt, in many many churches, the first words the Priest says in the service every week are "Our service begins on P. 355 in the Book of Common Prayer"  It's probably the most commonly used page of the prayer book, and in many churches the prayer books almost fall open to P.355.  So a little bit of silly Episcopal in joke there.  

Thee are so fun to make,  low stress and high visual impact.  I love using things in my studio and I'm happy to be making progress on this series.

Update on the Valentine's Blocks

 I know it's a really off time of year, but I'm still trying to get caught up on things I want to blog about.  Over the years I've mentioned that my mom has been making my sister and I a new valentine's quilt block every year since.  It's so much fun to see what she makes every year, in a lot of ways it's a journey through her quilting interests.  I think I last shared about this project in 2018, so I figured it was time for an update!  You can see previous posts about valentine's here.

The first block was 2010, and it was actually a fully quilted mug rug but since the next year she started making the quilt blocks, when I assembled the first few blocks or so blocks, I included the mug rug so it could be part of the whole thing.  Obviously I hope this quilt doesn't finish for a VERY long time, but I did decide to put together the first few blocks in 2018.  

This is the assembly of the 2010-2018 blocks.  So many fun things.

In 2019 she made us log cabin blocks, with silk screened letters.  Mom does a lot of custom silk screening on her art quilts.

The 2020 block includes a printed (transferred?) picture of me and my sister from halloween 1988.  It's probably kind of hard to tell from the picture, but I'm dressed as a pumpkin (on the right) and my little sister is Snow White (oh the black wig we had was so scratchy!) on the left.  Of course mom made all our wonderful costumes.

The 2021 block is a traditional Ohio star, because around that time mom was piecing lots of Ohio star blocks to later cut up and make into art quilts.  The resulting art quilts have the most beautiful piecing but don't look like Ohio stars at all.  One of the ones she made this way just got accepted into the newest SAQA Global show, Nature's Canvas.

The 2022 block was made using a technique Mom developed to design art quilts using morse code.  I think this one says "Love You" in morse code,  the different colors and sizes of blocks correspond to different dits and dashes.  She made a series of these and teaches this as a class if anyone is interested.

The 2023 block featured a bunch of fun fabrics that I think Mom got in Alaska the prior summer on their giant road trip.

The 2024 block was very exciting,  it features an abstract pieced flamingo.  In 2024, Mom started a series based on abstract pieced bird blocks and the first one was flamingos.  I was so excited that it was accepted into Quilt National 2025 and just debuted there last month.  

The 2025 block is sort of related to the 2024 block even though it's a log cabin again.  The extra special thing about the 2025 block is it is made from all Mom's hand-dyed fabrics.  In 2024 she started doing a lot of hand-dyeing and most of her art quilts (including the flamingo for Quilt National) now use her hand-dyed fabrics.

I love this project.  It's so fun to get a new block each year, to see what she's picked, and to have to to add to a permanent, growing project.  Love you Mom!!!

Brains!

 Last fall I went on a recruiting trip to the SACNAS conference to recruit for our OUHSC Biomedical Sciences PhD program.  

To help brighten up our university's booth, I decided to make a few brain quilts to hang.  I didn't really have much time, but I got a couple of our micrographs and had them printed on fun shiny fabric at spoonflower.

I had four prints on the big yard of fabric, I always try to optimize my prints when I do custom spoonflower orders.  The bottom left is a coronal section of the mouse brain stained for blood vessels and the other three are mult-photon micrographs of mouse brain blood vessels taken while through a coverslip mounted on our mouse's skull while the mouse is still alive (so we can measure vessel function).

The two small ones I finished at 12x12 and mounted on wooden frames.  These were raffle giveaways at the booth and were a big hit.

And here are the other two that we hung in the booth that are a big bigger.  They're not super creative in the sense that I just quilted the fabric pictures, but they were fun to hang in the booth.  At some point I'd like to cut these two up and do something more creative with them but for now they're just rolled up in the closet!!

For Your Mercy is Great: Finished

 In a couple of earlier posts this week, I shared in-progress posts about my newest liturgical quilt which is inspired by the Prayers of the People.  

Today I'm back to share the finished quilt.  I'm so pleased with how it turned out, I love the floating globe, and the pushed together letters, and the quilted fish, and the luxurious velvet borders. 

Here you get a good view of the quilted fish and the pink flowers that add a little warmth to the piece.

I love getting to "doodle" quilting in the open spaces,  here I tried to adde a little more warmth but doing some designs with heavy orange and brown thread.  The effect is good but I had some problems with the thread, so the back isn't great.

I tried to make northern Africa golden, in honor of its deserts.  You can see the gold rays that connect the globe to the rest of the quilt (the white is the wall behind the piece). 

In addition to there being leftover prairie dogs up in North America, I had two more prairie dogs in my scrap bin, again all leftover from a quilt from 2014, so I added them down here in the bottom corners where there was space.  I didn't have a great picture of the bottom prairie dog so sorry this one is a big fuzzy.

Here's the final thing one more time. I think it came out really well.  My overall goal was to capture the idea of praying for all people in need around the world, for their health and safety and for wise judgement in our leaders, and for a willingness to work for peace and harmony and especially to conserve our planet.

For Your Mercy is Great, c. 2025, Shannon Conley, 61" x 44"

The artist statement reads:

Part of my ongoing liturgical series, this piece reflects our spiritual charge to care for our world. Each week we pray collectively for the Universal Church, its members, and its mission; the nation and all in authority, he welfare of the world, the concerns of the local community, those who suffer and those in any trouble, and the departed. Prayer is the first step, and care and action are the next. Hear us Lord, for your mercy is great.

For Your Mercy is Great: Continued

 Earlier this week I shared the beginnint stages of the newest quilt in my liturgical series, inspired by the Prayers of the People.  After finishing the top, I layered it to quilt.  As I mentioned before, it was a bit dumb to cut out the central globe first, especially since I wanted to quilt it all together in order to make it as straight as possible. 

There wasn't as much space in this one for extra design elements, but i did quilt these happy fish (they were supposed to be rainbow trout in rememberance of the trout lakes my grandparents used to run, but really look mostly just like fish).

Here you can see my quilting setup and my quilting "helpers".  Mostly I think they want me to stop quilting and go play.

Here you can see the back, it's quilted pretty densely.  I used 100 weight thread around all the letters, and heavier thread for the borders and other decorative elements.

After quilting I wet blocked the whole thing square and then cut out the central globe again.  I wanted it to be suspended floating in the center of the quilt by these golden rays.  Each ray is a piece of peltex enclosed in gold fabric.  In the pictures below they are pinned in "backwards".  Once I got them sewed down, the parts sticking out below were trimmed off and the whole thing was flipped around and faced.

Here you can see blue "helping" again as I hand stitched down the facing around the globe,  you can see the finished edges of the rays sticking out.  I also faced the inner edge of the cut circle on the main quilt (where it looks raggedy in the picture above), and the outer edge of the whole quilt so that all the cut edges were nicely finished.

Come back on Friday to see the final quilt.

New Quilt: For Your Mercy is Great

Since 2013 I've been working on a series of quilts inspired by parts of the Episcopal worship services, mostly our Eucharistic service but also a few parts of our daily office (see all the parts of the series here and here).  There are a few pieces left for the series to be complete and one of them is the Prayers of the People.

This is a part of the service each week where we pray for others, and there are a bunch of different forms in our prayer book, but my favorite is Form VI.

From the Book of Common Prayer, 1982

Form VI

In peace, we pray to you, Lord God.

Silence

For all people in their daily life and work;
For our families, friends, and neighbors, and for those who are alone.

For this community, the nation, and the world;
For all who work for justice, freedom, and peace.

For the just and proper use of your creation;
For the victims of hunger, fear, injustice, and oppression.

For all who are in danger, sorrow, or any kind of trouble;
For those who minister to the sick, the friendless, and the needy.

For the peace and unity of the Church of God;
For all who proclaim the Gospel, and all who seek the Truth.

For [N. our Presiding Bishop, and N. (N.) our Bishop(s); and for] all bishops and other ministers;
For all who serve God in his Church.

For the special needs and concerns of this congregation.

Hear us, Lord;
For your mercy is great.

We thank you, Lord, for all the blessings of this life.

We will exalt you, O God our King;
And praise your Name for ever and ever.

We pray for all who have died, that they may have a place in
your eternal kingdom.

Lord, let your loving-kindness be upon them;
Who put their trust in you.

So that was the text I wanted to feature and the overall design idea was to feature a globe in the center surrounded by the text.  I wanted the globe to be floating in the middle of the quilt, and for some stupid reason I cut it out of my background fabric at the very begining.  There was no need for that, and it make things harder throughout but it worked out in the end.  

For the globe I used all my scraps of silk and organza and polyester to mosaic in the continents and oceans.  If you look closely you'll see two gian prairie dogs in North America that were leftover from this very long ago art quilt (2013-2014!).  I love using scrappy bits from the stash.

I did the mosaic part of the globe at our 4 Common Corners retreat last October and finished the final quilt sometime in early March this year I think.

The background fabric is a piece of dupioni silk that I dyed over Christmas 2023.

My silhouette cutter is pretty much at the end of it's life cycle and really isn't cutting well anymore, so I cut all the letters for this piece on my mom's Brother scan-n-cut.  And unlike other pieces with cut letters, these letters weren't in straight lines so getting them lined up on the quilt was tricky.  I would up using ironable transfer tape which enabled me to pick up big groups of letters of the cutting mat and position them as one, then iron down the letters, then remove the tape.  The transfer tape is what you see below that looks like clear plastic.

The words on the bottom of the circle go with the prayers I shared above, and the words at the top read "Hear us Lord" and "For your mercy is great."

Becuase I was going for a meditative repetitive feel, I wanted the letters to be reasonably low contrast and to run together.  So there are no spaces between workds and the colors blend with the background a little.  It's legible if you get close, but from afar just looks like a big block of text, like the feeling of praying over and over under your breath.

I had a bunch of velvet in my stash from Georgia (who was also the source of the silk- thanks Georgia!) and I wanted to use some of it for the borders.  I auditioned a couple of different colors.  The diamonds are also for the borders and designed to pull colors from the globe.

I wound up deciding to actually use three colors for the border, the gold to pick up the center , the intense dark turquoise, and the sage green.  They were a pain to piece even though just long strips because the velvets are bulky and don't like to feed evenly in my sewing machine, the gold is really lightweight and all of them are very slippery slinky.  I guess that's the penalty for using things that aren't cotton!

After assembling the borders I realized the whole quilt was looking really blue (literally) and needed some contrast.  One of the brocades in the globe had some pink accents and the whole quilt felt like it needed some warmth so I decided to make some pink flowers to go in the borders.  It meant cutting out a million little petals in five different shapes, but I think it added a great spark to the border. A bunch of these were fabrics I'd previously painted so up close they have some nice variation.

Come back later in the week for more on this project!