Blogger's Quilt Festival: Anonymous

It's time once again for the Blogger's Quilt Festival, hosted as ever by the indomitable Amy from Amy's Creative Side.  She does such a great job of hosting and gathering sponsors and it's really one of the premier online quilt shows anywhere.  I really encourage you to click through and see/comment on the fabulous entries.

This quilt is my entry in the Art category.  For my regular readers it'll be familiar as a recent finish, but I'm excited to have the opportunity to share it with a wider audience.

This piece began as my attempt to work abstractly, inspired only by shapes and colors.  As I worked though, I slowly saw a person emerging.  Others have seen a large bird or other abstract designs.  My nameless faceless person can be anyone you wish, though in my brain she is always a woman.  Some have said she looks like a desert dweller, or is reminiscent of a character from science fiction; maybe from the dunes of Arakkis or even a Jawa from Star Wars.  In any case, one of my favorite things about abstract or semi-abstract work is that there is room for many different interpretations.

The quilt is entirely pieced (not applique) and the central portion is a completely separate entity, pieced/quilted/faced on its own.  It was then stitched down to the separate dark blue background, again a fully finished "quilt" that serves to frame the central image.  I really had a fun time working on this project.  It was so different from the way I usually work, and forcing myself to commit to a design process  I wouldn't normally use was very rewarding.  For more details on the project, you can check out the tag.

Anonymous, c. 2016, Shannon Conley, 34"w x 45"h

My artist statement for this one is short and sweet:  In remembrance of women throughout the world who remain voiceless, oppressed, judged for their choices, or stripped of their identity. In solidarity of those of all faiths, or no faith, who choose inclusion rather than anger.

Anonymous, c. 2016, Shannon Conley, 34"w x 45"h, detail

Anonymous, c. 2016, Shannon Conley, 34"w x 45"h, detail

Anonymous, c. 2016, Shannon Conley, 34"w x 45"h, detail

Anonymous, c. 2016, Shannon Conley, 34"w x 45"h, detail

Do you work abstractly?  What is your design process usually like?

Thanks to all those who clicked through from the Blogger's Quilt Festival, and I encourage you all to check out the great quilts there.

Anonymous: finished!

Back in May I showed you my improvisationally pieced quilt top which started out quite abstract before slowly resolving into something that looks, to me at least, a lot like a person.  I free motion machine quilted it as always, more or less following the general curves of the piece and using both contrasting and matching threads.  After finishing the quilting and indulging in some creative consultation with my mom, it became apparent that it not only needed to be cropped, but that the pale background was blending in to the white wall.  I therefore decided to mount it on a dark blue quilted background which I think grounds it nicely.

So here it is finished.  And many many thanks to Mike for taking all these final pictures.  I think he really managed to get great definition in the quilting on the background without washing out the foreground too much.  Many of the fabrics are silky/shiny, and they look great in person.  I'll keep everyone posted if it goes out into the world.

Anonymous, c. 2016, Shannon Conley, 34"w x 45"h

My artist statement for this one is short and sweet:  In remembrance of women throughout the world who remain voiceless, oppressed, judged for their choices, or stripped of their identity.

Anonymous, c. 2016, Shannon Conley, 34"w x 45"h, detail

Anonymous, c. 2016, Shannon Conley, 34"w x 45"h, detail

Anonymous, c. 2016, Shannon Conley, 34"w x 45"h, detail

Anonymous, c. 2016, Shannon Conley, 34"w x 45"h, detail

Linking up to the fabulous Nina-Marie as always as well as TGIFF!

Color Study

One of the exercises from the class I took with Jean Wells Keenan earlier this year was to put together a strip set using her freeform curved piecing technique and whatever color palette appealed to us.  I had planned on using oranges and blues along with some creamy neutrals (as you may recognize from the other pieces I worked on in that class here and here) so that's what I used for my strip set.

When I got home from the workshop, I decided to try Jean's portrait finish technique, and turn my strip set into a finished mini quilt.  In her portrait finish, she quilts/finishes the central part and then stitches it down onto another fully quilted/finished background piece.   This is similar to how I did the dogs; her work was actually the inspiration for how I finished/mounted that piece.

I auditioned several background colors and although I wanted to love the brights, I settled on the navy on the far right.

After piecing in some colored strips and chunks of piecing to help the background tie in to the central panel, I quilted the background, faced it, and then stitched on the central panel. It's not very big, maybe about 16 x 22, but I thought it was a fun way to finish what would otherwise have turned into another orphan block sitting in a bin!  

Trying to figure out where to place the center panel was challenging, I moved it around a fair amount and settled on an arrangement which lined up some of the center piecing with background piecing.  However, this put the top edge of the central panel too close to the top of the background, so I wound up having to cut off some of the orange on the top of the center panel.  I wish I hadn't had to lose so much of the orange, I feel like it helped balance the top and all the blue, but it really looked funny with so little space between the top of the quilt and the top of the center panel.

Color Study, Shannon Conley c. 2016

What do you guys do with leftover blocks/class exercises?

I'm linking up with the fabulous Nina-Marie, click over to check out all the other fabulous arty things people are working on.

New Project: Improvisational Piecing

As I've mentioned, I was lucky to get to take a 5 day workshop with Jean Wells Keenan at Asilomar this spring and it was a really great experience.  Her work includes lots of intuitive piecing, two things (working intuitively and piecing) that I'm generally terrible at, so it was a great opportunity for me to get to push myself to try new things.

We were to bring inspirational pictures, and the class was called something like "abstracting from nature" so most people worked from nature pictures.  However, as much as I love the outdoors (especially at asilomar) I wasn't feeling that vibe.  Rather my inspiration and pinboards lately have been filled with bold, graphic, sculptural art so I brought a pile of pictures in that vein.  Before going, I used this picture as a color scheme to help guide what fabrics I packed, so wound up with lots of blues, oranges and neutrals.  I really love this combination, especially with a few pops of saturated fuschia.  Yum.  I also liked the sculptural nature of those pants, but in the end used this beautiful paper sculpture as the jumping off point for my sketching.

The first part of the class involved exercises in color selection and the curved piecing technique that Jean uses.  That was really helpful to me-I love curves, but have always hated having to precisely match up seams and curves.  It was great to be able to piece freely along the curves.

After doing some initial exercises, we started sketching and abstracting.  This is where I really had to let go- typically I sketch/draw/design until I have a full pattern (either on paper or in illustrator) and then follow my pattern.  Here though I sketched and abstracted and sketched and cropped until I had some shapes that were reminiscent of the original inspiration, but really quite different.  Then I just started piecing-keeping a vague idea of the direction I wanted my curves to go, but otherwise just letting things build.

Small sketches

This was my final "pattern" which was just mainly a suggestion for the directionality of curves/piecing.

These were the first two sections I pieced.  You can see they're a little lumpy from all the curves, but judicious pressing and reseaming when irredeemable bubbles formed solved the problem.  I found this process of piecing curves worked great as long as I was willing to let go of any preconceived notions about making something that matched my pattern.

Here with the third inner set pieced and pinned up.  It was feeling a little top heavey at this point and there was a ton of "waste" where the two orange sections overlapped, so I cut off the overlap and auditioned a bunch of different ways to incorporate the piecing I whacked off.

I settled on that option on the bottom right.  Once that was sewn on, there was another bit of light orange overlap to cut off, which I wound up positioning at the bottom left.

At this point I found that it had completely diverged from my original sketch and that it looked a bit like a person wrapped up in a scarf or shawl. One of the exercises we did in the class was to go around and leave one word about how all the pieces resonated with us.  My sheet had all kinds of great words from my classmates, many of which were spacey/science fiction-y in nature.  I thought it looked kind of like a Jawa, others suggested a still suit a la-Frank Herbert and Dune, and many others had additional sci-fi words.  

The yarn lines are pinned up to help guide/audition the piecing and design lines in the background.  That was one of Jean's suggestions and I found it really helpful for deciding how to fill in all the background area.

And here it is with the background pieced in.  This is how it is still, hanging on my design wall waiting to be quilted.  Originally the pale purple inside the blue circle corresponded to open space behind that paper sculpture, but as it's taken on a more figurative aspect, I've been wondering whether I ought to paint that central purple piece dark- maybe to look something like the picture below.  Thoughts?

It'll be the next thing to finish, although I still have to decide how to quilt it.  I'm not sure how I'll finish it- I may cut it off square, but I might also decide to make uneven edges to reflect the curved piecing.  I'll wait to decide until after I quilt it.