2025 SAQA Benefit Auction Quilts

 The SAQA Benefit Auction is here again.  It's always one of the most fun fundraising events of the year and this year is no exception.  The auction runs from September 12-October 5 and you can find more information and browse the almost 400 fantastic pieces availabe by navigating to the SAQA website here: https://www.saqa.com/auction

This year I decided to do another one of my fancy initials and was inspired by all the wonderful wildlife mom and I saw on our trip to Florida for the annual SAQA conference.  I chose A is for Anhinga, a wonderful type of bird I'd never seen until visiting the Everglades.  They were just gorgeous.  Dark but patterned, large and with wonderful curvy necks.

I did some couched yarn on the letter too- that's always a fun way to add texture.

While making the A is for Anhinga for the SAQA Auction, I also decided to make two more of these quilts for wonderful SAQA staffers Martha Sielman and Jennifer Solon.  They do so much for SAQA and I've really enjoyed interacting with them on the board the last five and a half years.  So here's a J for Jennifer

And an M for Martha.  Martha is a big bird person so hers features an M is for Mockingbird.

Definitely check out the SAQA benefit auction, it really is a super way to get a great small art quilt and support a fantastic organization.

New Knit Socks (et al.)

 Some more crafty updates today!  Earlier this year my senior graduate student graduated and she got a taxidermied mouse as a graduation present.  She asked me to make it a lab coat and a knitted shawl.  The lab coat was ok, but I decided to make the shawl crocheted intead of knitted.  No pattern, but I think it came out ok.  Sadly I don't have any pictures of the mouse wearing these items.  Science crafty mice for the win!

Also earler this summer, while at a wonderful cerebrovascular biology conference, I knitted a pair of socks.  I the same general approach I always do but I screwed up the heels twice.  And after un-knitting once, I gave up after the second time.  Somehow the socks are the right length but the heels are gigantic.  The were frankensocks (to use up scrap yarn) and I love all the colors, but I just wish the heels weren't so big.  I guess if I ever have lower extremity edema they'll be great.  Of course I'm wearing them anyway!  I saw a book called "How to knit socks that fit" and I think I need to get it!

Summer Baking

 

I haven't had time to keep up with weekly blogging I like posts, but I wanted to drop in and share some of the things I might normally share in those posts.  This includes things I've been baking and cooking during the last few months, especially with fruit and veggies from the gardens.  I had a really good crabapple crop this year, but didn't have time to deal with all the ones from the tree.  I harvested about half the tree, but then unfortunately a bunch of them fermented while waiting for me to get around to processing them.  It's ok, I still have lots left from 2023. 

In any case, I did make 3 dozen jars of jelly this year along with some fruit leather.  Since I had so many jalapeños in the garden I added a bunch of them to the jelly this year for the first time.  The jelly isn't spicy, it just has a delightful complementary pepper flavor to it.  I think it turned out really tasty!

I had a good blackberry crop in the garden this year as well.  I only have a couple of plants, and of course I had to pick them as soon as they got ripe, so during blackberry season I went out every day and picked.  Usually I got a handful each day and I just put them mostly straight in the freezer.  There were enough for a couple of cobblers by the end of the harvest and they are so good.  

And of course with so many jalapeños there have been several batches of poppers.  They're always a hit,  the danger is they're not really particularly healthy.  But super fun for a game night or ballgame.

And not from the garden, but my friend Brett brought me back a cookbook with Italian baked goods, and I tried this chocolate espresso torte recipe.  It was very delicious and rich, definitely a fun thing to add to the  baked goods rotation.

Squash bugs ate all the squash and pumpkins in the garden, so none of that.  The pepper plants, tomato plants, and green beans are still producing though, so more of that should be coming for summer harvest.  And my flowers are growing ok too.  Right now we're in the really hot time, hopefully I can get the flowers through to september and then they should do better.

Summer Crafting

 I have been working on art quilts lately, but the progress has been slow, but I thought I'd share a few posts on other crafty stuff that's been going on.  My nephew Alex broke his arm at summer camp so can't do quite as many activites as usual.  But he loves succulents, so when he and my sister came up a few weeks ago, we had fun making these little terraria (including adding in some lego minifigs).

He also wanted to make spool people.  We started out with spools but then branched into some rubber stoppers I had from work. Just fun with random craft supplies.

Later on in the summer, my friend brought over her two crafty granddaughters and we had another crafty evening, this time making notebook covers.  I had a bunch of small empty notebooks and we made fabric covers for them.  The girls picked out fabrics from the stash and did the sewing and cutting.  It was fun!  They also had fun making a little bow for Blue's head,  I'm not sure what he thought of the proceedings.

One of them chose this delightful orange and black cat fabric that I picked up somewhere on sale after halloween.  I also used it to make a pillow cover for a friend of mine.  

And around the same time I stitched up a cover for another one of our choir books.

And a final random crafty project,  my mom's dog chewed off the top of her favorite hiking hat.  She sent it to me to mend and I was pretty proud of how good the mend turned out.  You can see the patch, but given the fact that the whole top had been ripped off along with part of the front I think it turned out pretty well!

Hope you're all staying cool this summer and having some fun crafty time.

Graduation Present for Julia

 At the end of May the daughter of a close friend of mine graduated from high school.  She's a lovely young lady, and I've gotten to know her better over the last two years. 

She's a cellist and is headed to Eastman Conservatory in New York this next fall so I ordered this cello fabric from spoonflower and made her a zip-top tote bag to carry music in. I know it's hard to tell the scale from the pictures, but it's big enough for binders, etc.  The Cello front is a patch pocket and there's a zip pocket inside.

Then I made a smaller zip pouch (more like pencil case sized) with her initials on it.  It was fun to scratch my bag making itch on these two simple projects.

Very many congratulations to Julia!

Spring Wreaths with Becky

Earlier this spring my sister Becky came up to visit and we were looking for a crafty scrappy project to complete in a weekend.  I'd previously purchased three metal wreath forms intending to make some door wreaths- I have a summer one and a Christmas one, but I wanted a third one to go in there, but I never got around to doing anything with them.  I can't even remember what the original idea was when I bought the wreath forms, but Becky and I decided that scrappy tied wreaths were the way to go.  Of course I had a ton of fabric scraps and some fun trims to use.   We did, of course, make a giant mess.

We wound up making three wreaths.  The purple one is mine and it hung on my door for the spring and early part of the summer.  I'm not sure what "season" that is, but any time is purple time in my book.  And it was a fun afternoon of crafting.

 

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.