Bromeliad: Finished

Last week I talked about making the base and petals for my new sculptural flower quilt inspired by a bromeliad.  After making these individual parts, it was time to assemble them.

I started by cutting slits the width of the petals into the origami base of the quilt.  I zig-zag stitched around the openings, then turned the quilt inside.  Once it was inside out, I poked the base of each petal through from the "front" (inside in the pictures below) to the "back" outside on the pictures below.  Then I connected all the petal wires together like a giant spider web, and hand stitched each petal base to the flower base at several parts. That was fairly challenging, my arm was barely long enough to reach in to get several of them.  Turning the whole thing right side out was a giant pain between the stiffness of the base and the fact that now there was a bunch more wire inside, not to mention a ton of quilted pokey petals, but I got it done.

Here you can see it in the process of being turned right-side out.

I'd originally hoped that the wire spiderweb and the hand tacking would be enough to hold the petals in place, but I didn't like how much gaping there was between the petals and the base, so I went back along each petal and hand stitched the petal to the base.  It was tough, I had to do it while the sculpture was on the wall, and of course the base is filled with aluminum window screen, so there were lots of pokey bits along the cut edges where the petals protrude.  I also realized that the flower was pretty saggy.  The base on its own was self-supporting but once I put all the petals on it didn't hold itself up enough so I had to put a wooden skeleton inside.  My arms and hands got pretty scraped up doing this, but finally after a fair amount of sculpting and some additional painting of the petals (which were looking very flat to me), I finally got it how I wanted it an Mike was able to come take some final pictures!  It's about 3x4 feet and protrudes a little over 2 feet out from the wall.

On Bromeliads, c. Shannon Conley, 2018.  32" x 50" x 28"  Photo courtesy of Mike Cox

On Bromeliads, c. Shannon Conley, 2018.  Detail 32" x 50" x 28"  Photo courtesy of Mike Cox

On Bromeliads, c. Shannon Conley, 2018.  Detail 32" x 50" x 28"  Photo courtesy of Mike Cox

I like the way it turned out, but because it's sort of abstracted and the petals have a red/green combo,  the final outcome reminds me more of what I imagine the offspring of a bromeliad and a poinsettia would look like than a straight up bromeliad.  But I guess that's ok!  I think this is my last big 3D flower for a while.  It's been fun making them and exploring different ways to confer dimensionality, but I think I'm going to work on some other stuff now.....

Remember, if you're in Santa Fe, NM between now and the middle of December, stop by the New Mexico State Capitol to see this and several other of my dimensional pieces in our show Off the Wall: Contemporary Mixed Media Works.

New Quilt: The Bromeliad

Over the last couple of years I've made two large abstract sculptural flower quilts, one of a dahlia and one of an iris, and I knew I wanted to complete a third one for our show at the NM State Capitol.  I have this lovely red bromeliad at the house, and I've loved bromeliads ever since my dad gave my mom this pink one decades ago.  A few months back mine started to bloom again, and I decided it should be my next abstracted flower.  All of these three-dimensional pieces have used a different approach for making them hold their shape, and this time I was inspired by this origami ornament my mom folded for me a while back, and I decided I'd use that shape as the flower base.

I started with some red velvet (thanks Georgia!) and layered it with wool batting and regular cotton backing, but I decided to include a layer of aluminum window screen inside my quilt sandwich (like in the Tesseract) to give me a little bit of structural support and sculptability.  I first quilted the fold lines so I'd know where/how to fold it into the origami structure, and painted it.  After painting, I then quilted away.

All of the edges will be inside the final sculpture, so after quilting I squared up and then finished the edges by wrapping the front fabric around and machine stitching down.  The next step was to start folding, and you can see the shape of the original ornament start to emerge.

I stitched along three of the four edges that hold the 3D structure and left the 4th one open so I could get inside the structure to mess with the leaves/petals.  I wound up putting velcro along the edges so I could get it to stay shut later.

The next step was to make the leaves/petals, and I made three different sizes out of three different painted red, green, and pink fabrics.  I had couple of different red velvets/velours, a pink synthetic fabric with a weave that reminded me of a coarse shot cotton, and a green sweater knit that I used for the petals/leaves. I quilted them in big groups leaving a channel on the edge of each one (to cut them apart) and in the middle for a piece of wire.  It was way easier to just leave a channel for the wire rather than try to quilt around the wire already inside like I did on the iris!  Alas, in the end I made way too many petals, so I have a ton of them leftover in case I ever want them for something else.

Next week I'll share pictures of how I attached the petals and show the finished quilt!