Blue-Finished!

Last week I shared the in progress pics for my new quilt based on some old cyanotypes I'd made a long time ago.  With an exquisite sense of bad timing, I decided to make this quilt about a week after entries closed for our regional SAQA show "Out of the Blue," but I guess that's life!  I had a lot of fun quilting it and thinking about what to put in each little region.  This is a much more traditional quilt that I usually make, so it was fun to use things like feathers.  It was fun also to work with the blue-beige-yellow-sand colorway.  That's not usually my go-to choice, so it was fun to stretch my creative brain a bit.  It was a fairly small quick project and I enjoyed working on it!  I really enjoy all different forms of printmaking, and it reminded me that I should go back and try some more cyanotyping.

Blue, 37" x 27" c. Shannon Conley 2019.  Photo Mike Cox

New Quilt: Blue

Back in 2012 I made a bunch of 6" cyanotypes from some photographs I'd taken on one of our trips to Asilomar.  It was a lot of fun, and you can read about it here, but I never knew what to do with them.

A month or so ago I thought I needed a center block for this year's Cotton Robin, so I pulled one of the blocks out and did some improvisational piecing around it to make it up to size.  When I was finished though, I decided I liked it too much to send it off for the round robin.  Incidentally, I made another block for that only to realize that I'd neglected to officially sign up this year.  Anyway, I started pinning the rest of the cyanotypes on my wall to see if I could make a small quilt with them.  There weren't very many, but I just kept rearranging and rearranging and piecing and cutting and piecing until I had something I liked.  It was a very freeing way to work, I don't do a whole lot of piecing and it was fun to find old scraps and make little groupings.

I wound up with this final composition-  lots of different types of piecing but it was fun to assemble.  Come back next week to see the quilting and the finished piece!