Missy Quilt: Finished

Earlier in the week I shared the beginning steps in a quilted portrait of our little dog Missy.  We had to put her down earlier this year, and I made this portrait for Mike to commemorate her.

After I finished collage-ing the top, I quilted it using very basic blendy free motion quilting.  The quilt is busy enough that I knew fancy quilting wouldn't show up.  I decided to mount it on a pre-stretched canvas, so I followed a technique Susan Carlson uses in her class to make a fabric frame to wrap around the edge of the canvas.  Unfortunately, somehow I messed up the way I sewed the fabric frame to the edge of the quilt and I wound up with these strange pointy excess fabric bits on each corner (below left).  I had to fold them over and hand-stitch them down (below right), but I wish I knew what happened to cause it.  I really like this finishing method for things that are not going to quilt shows, so I'd like to get it worked out.

After finishing the canvas wrap, I mounted the whole thing floating inside the frame I made.  I'd gone back and forth about staining the frame dark, but I finally decided to leave it light to complement Missy's colors, so I just put a couple of coats of clear coat on the frame to give it a more finished feel.

Missy, c. Shannon Conley, 2018, 24" x 24"

When you look at some of the up close detail shots you can see all the tiny little pieces of fabric on there.  The nose, mouth, and paws were the most precision oriented on her.

We love you and miss you Missy!

New Quilt: Missy

Earlier this year we had to put down our tiny Shih Tzu Missy.  She was mean and obnoxious and hated me always (unless Mike was gone and then she loved me), and growled at me every night when I came to bed.  But she was cute and I loved her anyway.  She had so much personality; when she was a puppy she used to run up and grab my ponytail to play with it.  I remember she used to love to hop in the shower or into the bathtub to lick up the water after we'd showered, but she could never get back out of the bathtub, so you'd suddenly hear this catastrophic caterwauling, as though she was being mauled to death, only to rush in and discover she just wanted you to pick her up and put her out of the bathtub.  She hated being petted, but she didn't mind being held, and would snuggle up nicely next to you on the chair.  She always wanted to sleep right up next to you, usually Mike, but me if he was gone.  If you tried to roll over away from her she would snuggle right back up, until by the morning she'd pushed you all the way to the very edge of the bed.  But even though I loved her, she was really Mike's dog.  Those two had an unbelievable connection.  She was never parted from him if possible, and when he left the house she would wander all over looking at him.  Sometimes if he went to work in the garage or something she would just stand with her nose against the garage door until he came back inside.

After we put her down, I decided to make a quilted portrait of her for Mike.  I started from one of his favorite pictures, this shot of her riding on the back of his motorcycle with her little pink doggles.

I used Susan Carlson's technique, and even though I love rainbow colors, I figured that for him I would stick with realistic colors.  Here are some in progress shots as I was collage-ing her.

I wasn't going to try to do the motorcycle in the background because I really wanted the focus to be on her, but I wanted a dark background so she'd pop.  I decided on navy and started collage-ing behind her.  It really makes her stand out.

I'll share the rest of the process (quilting and finishing) on Friday, but I wanted to share another construction part here.  I decided I was going to mount her on stretcher bars/canvas, but instead of just having a gallery wrapped edge, I wanted to have her in a floating frame.  I purchased a bunch of pine trim pieces and started building, but quickly realized that cutting the corners with my old worn down plastic miter box was going to be a nightmare.  So I took the opportunity to buy a miter saw.  It was really wonderful and made nice beautiful cuts.  Unfortunately, it was pouring rain so I couldn't use it on the back porch and it wound up making a disaster in my studio.  I assembled the frame using clamps, ratchet straps, wood glue, and finishing nails.

Check back on Friday for the final reveal!

Pet Postcards

Once again, Pokey Bolton is collecting 4x6 fabric postcards to sell at the Houston Quilt Show this year to raise money for Houston Animal Shelters.  Pet adoption is a cause I feel very strongly about, and we're actually going to the Houston Quilt Show this year, so I thought I'd better make some.

I encourage everyone to participate, it doesn't take that long to make one and send it in.  For more information, you can see Pokey's blog post:  http://pokeysponderings.com/2013/06/28/quilters-its-time-to-get-busy-quilt-festivals-pet-postcard-project-is-back/

I made six, one for each of my dogs.  We don't have six dogs now, these are just all the dogs I've had and loved (not counting the lots and lots from growing up).  Six cards also fit easily on two 8.5 x 11 sheets of paper (to run through the printer).  I fixed my pictures in photoshop and then printed them onto regular fabric (I used a very light green batik) which had been stuck to a full size mailing label.  The first three may look familiar, they're just slightly altered versions of the larger dog portraits.  The other three are pictures of my dogs which either passed away before or came to us after the large dog portrait project started. For those, I found a picture of the dog I liked and superimposed the dog on a brightly colored abstracted background.  

Missy, who was adopted in ~2007 from Mike's brother who couldn't take care of her.

Bullett, who was adopted in 2006 from a girl at Walmart whose dad was going to drop him at the Humane Society

Pumpkin, who was adopted in 2007 from the Oklahoma City Humane Society.

My precious Angel, who was adopted in 2003 from the Humane Society of Southern Arizona..

Bentley, who was adopted in 2010 from Second Chance Animal Shelter in Norman, OK.

Shooter, adopted in 2012.  She was a stray out in the country northeast of Oklahoma City.

I don't know what I'd do without the dogs!

The Dogs are finished!

I'm so pleased to share that just two years and two weeks after it appeared on my first UFO list, I've finished the dog portraits!  For those of you who haven't been following along since the beginning, these are thread painted portraits of three of my dogs, mounted portrait style (only the top edge sewn down a la Jean Wells) to a separate quilt background on which silhouettes of said dogs have been thread sketched.  To see more posts about this project, click on the Dog Portrait tag.

The label text reads:  

"The Dogs"  Bullett, Missy, and Pumpkin.  Now there are four and Pumpkin is gone but they are all always in our hearts.

At some point I'll have to do a project incorporating the new two (Bentley and Shooter), but for now these three are staring out at me, filled with personality.

The Dogs.  c. Shannon Conley, 2013, 29"x 49"

Bullett

Missy

Pumpkin

I'm linking up with Nina-Marie, Richard & Tanya, Quilt Story, and Leah Day!

More quilting on the background dogs

I've finished (almost) all the quilting on the background!  I showed a couple pictures of the fills on Wednesday and here are a few pictures of the dog outlines all quilted in.  I say almost finished only because I just realized that Missy's left ear crosses over a background section and I should have had my radiating lines and switched colors.  ARGH.  Too bad because I just blocked it this morning.  I guess I'll just have to rip out carefully.

Next up (after fixing the ear), squaring and facing, then figuring out how to attach the thread painted portraits.

Linking up with Leah and Nina-Marie!

Wordless WIP: Wednesday

I'm quilting....

The end is in sight!

Linking up with Lee and Leah.

Dog Background

I'm not sure if I ever explained what I was going to do with the three thread painted dog portraits once I finished them.  I decided to mount them (process still to be determined) on a larger quilted background piece.  On that background piece, I decided to bobbin quilt outline drawings of the dogs, just a little offset.

So after layering, basting, and lining up my drawings on the back, I started the bobbin quilting around the first two dogs.  The thread I'm using in the bobbin is Halo by Superior.  My mom lent me a spool.  So far it's running absolutely great in the bobbin (knock on wood).

Here's where the dogs are so far; I think I need to go back and work on Missy's left ear and Bullet's jawline.  It's kind of hard to tell from the back as you're sewing how it's going to look.  The fabric is actually navy, the last (out-of-focus-cellphone)-picture shows more or less how it's going to be arranged in the end.

Linking up with Nina-Marie as always.  I hope everyone has a good weekend!

WIP: The Dogs

I haven't written a progress-update post in a while, mostly because I haven't been making much progress!  When I got back from Seattle last week I spent a fair amount of time cleaning up the studio in anticipation of really digging back into my various ongoing projects, and as testament to how long it's been since I've really gone through things, the pile on my "most current things" table had unaddressed stuff from early March...

I got it all cleaned up and have since been working away on my dog portraits which I'll talk more about in a minute.  I do somehow seem to have gotten a bunch of unfinished projects tacked up in mid-completion.

So, no progress this week on:
Armadillo Whole Cloth (this is just for practice FMQ)
Orchard Quilt (I'm about 1/3rd done quilting this)
Mountains (This just needs binding/pocket/label, but I'm still not totally satisfied with the large green foreground mountains, so we'll see what I decide)
Rainbow Star (The next step on this is piecing the piano key border)
Mammal Medallion (This is my next big art quilt, still in the early design stages)

I have been working hard on the dog portraits- I'd originally wanted to finish them by the end of this month to enter a show, but I really don't think I'm going to make it.

Since I last posted I finished the thread painting on the Pumpkin dog and layered the Pumpkin dog and the Bullett dog for quilting.  I stretched/ironed them out as flat as I could (Bullett had been stapled to a blocking board for months anyway), and layered them with two batts.  I used wool batting since that's what I have right now.  I put two batts because I thought that might help with any distortion in the top from the dense thread painting and that it might give a little extra weight to help with hanging.  I hate seeing quilts that don't hang straight and flat (and mine often have that problem).

I'm quilting each dog separately and then am going to mount them to a separate quilted back piece (kind of like pinning a picture to a bulletin board).  More on that when I get to it.  I quilted the "dog" part of Bullett and Pumpkin using clear monofilament (since they're already so covered in thread from the thread painting), and was pleased with how they flattened out.

I decided to wait to do the backgrounds until I've thread painted Missy since I'd like all the backgrounds to look consistent and I think I'll have a better chance of that if I quilt them at the same time.  So in the last couple of days I've been working on Missy.  Slow going with all the thread changes but I think she's looking good so far (the weird circle is where I had her hooped).

I've noticed that the thread painting on Pumpkin is much more dense than that on Bullett (who was finished first a couple of years back).  I'm trying for a happy medium on Missy.

No Link up at Lee's this week, but I'm going to be sharing over at the fabulous Nina-Marie's.

Woof Woof- the dogs are out!

Happy Wednesday everyone!  I've been sewing lately, but not manically and not with much to show for it. Last weekend was filled almost entirely with non-sewing obligations, and the next three weekends I'll either be out-of-town or have guests visiting.

Bonus though, the guests this weekend are my sister Becky and the beloved not-quite-a-baby-anymore Anna Banana!  I'm so super excited to see them.  Becky thinks Anna is old enough to be introduced to (edible, non-toxic) play doh, so we're going to make some and see what happens.  Also, super exciting news, Anna's going to have a baby brother along in September, so boy sewing starts now!

Anyhow,  I want to share a bit this week about a project that I've finally pulled out of the wasteland of the WIP-drawers, my dog portrait quilt.  This is actually the only item left on my very first UFO-WIP list, from back in 2011.  Sadly, I haven't really done anything with it since then.  I mentioned back at the beginning of this year that finishing it was going to be one of my goals for this year.  I hadn't planned to start working on it until this summer but my mom sent me this call for entry and I thought I might try to finish it and enter.  

I started with three pictures of my (then) three dogs, Pumpkin, Bullett, and Missy and then edited them in photoshop.  Pumpkin has since passed away and we've acquired two new dogs, but I'm just doing these three for this project.

I printed them on fabric sheets we treated and ironed to freezer paper and then sewed them together, so each one is about the size of four 8.5 x 11 pieces of paper.  I put interfacing on the backs of all of them but evidently not strong enough because Bullett and Pumpkin both shrunk up when I started the thread painting.  I got so frustrated with that, I put them away (for a couple of years!).  I really love the edited pictures though so I'm just going to power through and finish them.  They'll all be assembled into one piece, probably with offset grey borders/sashing.

Bullett has been completely thread painted.  Pumpkin was two-thirds done when I put them aside; in the last week I've finished her left eye, ear, and the side of her face. My goal for the rest of this week is to finish her mouth and chest.

Pumpkin

Pumpkin, Detail

Since I'm thread painting really densely in one area but not others (the backgrounds) I don't think there's any way to completely avoid the shrinking.  However, to minimize it I've started hooping whatever section I want to work on, which has the added benefit of being easier to maneuver.  I've decided I'm going to get all three dogs done and then block them out as flat as I can, then layer for quilting before filling in the backgrounds.  I'm not optimistic about this since they're really wrinkly, but I'll hope for the best.

Anybody have any experience with this kind of thread painting?  I haven't started Missy yet, so any suggestions for a better approach would be greatly appreciated.  

I'm linking up with Lee over at WIP Wednesday and Nina-Marie over at the Off the Wall Friday.

WIP Wednesday: Woof Woof

I haven't posted in a couple of Wednesdays so this is more my progress over the last ~3 weeks rather than the last week.

The project I wanted to share today is one I have just become re-interested in after becoming frustrated and setting it aside.  Long-time readers may remember I mentioned it in my UFO list way back at the beginning of last summer (ouch) and I haven't made too much progress on it since then.  I decided to do some thread painted portraits of my dogs, so I found pictures I'd taken of each of them, scanned them into photoshop, and then played around with the colors and backgrounds until I got combinations I liked.  It's actually really sad, but since I started this project we had to put down my precious Pumpkin dog, and have acquired the wonderful Bentley dog.  I thought about doing a Bentley portrait as well, but decided that not all the dogs would be in every project anyway, so I'd just stick with three.

I was going to show the original pictures and my photoshopped versions, but at the moment I can't find any of them.  Somewhere on some computer (sigh).  This is what happens when I delay on projects.  Just believe me when I say the dogs aren't blue/purple/yellow.

After photoshopping, I printed the pictures out on 4 pieces of fabric prepared for inkjet printing, and sewed them together.  I didn't really know anything about thread painting, but I did know I needed some sort of base, so on the first one (the Bullett dog), I used some kind of fusible interfacing I had in my stash.  It worked ok, but as I didn't know anything about thread painting, I didn't really stabilize around the dog part first and I thread painted really densely all over the dog without putting anything in the background, so the whole thing drew up and puckered terribly.  After finishing the dog part on Bullett, I went on to Pumpkin and used a layer of interfacing and a layer of muslin-type fabric, but it still pulled up and puckered (again, I missed out on things like stabilizing the background).  After that I got so frustrated with how they were all puckered that I put them away until just last week.

My re-interest in the project was sparked by two things.  First, I decided I wanted to have a "quilting" project going at the same time as a piecing project since my singer is up and running now, and the threadpainting seemed like a good thing to work on (rather than starting something new).  The more important thing though, was that I took a class at MQS from Dusty Farrell (more on that on Friday).  He does lovely thread painted quilts with high density thread painting in the center and regular (albeit dense) quilting in the background.  His quilt at the show hung perfectly straight.  When I asked him in the class how he managed that, he told me mostly he just stretches and stretches and blocks and blocks and blocks.  Of course, he also showed us in the class how he stabilizes the area around his thread painting and applique too, which probably would have helped me immensely from the get go.  In addition, he does all his thread painting on the longarm (through all three layers), so there's already a bit more tension on his "canvas" than mine.  Anyway,  I was inspired to pull back out my dogs.  My first task was to soak them all and stretch them as much as I could and block them out. I didn't do the Missy dog (since she hadn't been started yet), but I did the other two.  I couldn't do them on the design wall since I couldn't pull hard enough against pins to get them as stretched as necessary, so I staple gunned them to a piece of plywood covered in canvas.

So here they are!  My next step is to finish the thread painting on the Pumpkin dog since she's mostly finished already and then quilt the background of the Pumpkin and Bullett dogs (i.e. with batting/backing).

Pumpkin dog

Bullett dog

Missy Dog

This is as stretched as I could get them.  You can see they're definitely still a little puckery and not square, but so much better than they were.  I think I can work it out with them like this.   I promise to have a better picture of the Missy portrait when I start sewing on her.  Incidentally,  I'd done some really terrible quilting in the background of the Bullett dog and needed to rip it out.  Sadly I forgot to do that until after I'd soaked him for stretching.  I can tell you, the only thing worse than ripping out tiny knotted quilting stitches is ripping them out when your fabric is wet.  Don't.  Just Don't.

Finished Projects:
Poppy Purses
Twirly Skirt
Summer Blouse
MQS Pillow

Actively Ongoing Projects:
Seymour-the-Dinosaur
Dog portraits
Crochet flower blocks

Projects Currently on Hold:
Nativity Quilt
Star English Paper Piecing (waiting to see if I like the new thread better)
Yellow Whole Cloth Quilt

Linking up as usual with Lee and Sew Much Ado.