2024 SAQA Benefit Auction

 The 2024 SAQA Benefit Auction starts tomorrow.  It's a super great opportunity to pick up really wonderful small art pieces while benefitting a great organization.  I encourage all of you to click over and borwse through the available artworks and find out more on how to bid.  The auction runs from September 13 to October 6 and you can find out more information here:  https://www.saqa.com/auction

These are just a few of the pieces available in the auction this year.

I actually started mine last year.  It uses a free-motion openwork technique where you quilt over open spaces that are temporarily filled  by water soluble stabilizer.  After finishing, you soak the piece in water, the stabilizer dissolves, and you're left with a lovely openwork effect.  I've used this many times over the years, including in my VLA quilt, my SAQA donation quilt in 2018, and Listen Louder than you Sing among others.

Q is for...., 12x12, c. Shannon Conley, 2024

This is my mom's donation for the auction this year,  it uses her handcarved fossil blocks.

SAQA Auction Quilts

 My first new quilt of this year features a bunch of boxelder bugs crawling all over it.  It's for one of the calls for our art quilt group 4 Common Corners, and I'll blog about it separately.  But in the process of cutting out the bugs using my silhouette cutter, I realized that I had all these "bug frames" leftover after I peeled out the fabric bug shapes.  You can see the cut lines in the picture below.

I didn't want to waste the frame bits, especially since they cut fairly cleanly, so I grabbed a couple of them and decided to use them for my annual SAQA auction quilts.  Every spring, SAQA invites people to submit a very small quilt (6" x 8") to their Spotlight Auction which is held in conjunction with the annual conference.  And then in the fall, we all submit 12" x 12" quilts for the annual benefit auction.

The bugs and frames were backed with fusible so I grabbed the frames and fused them down to some handpainted pinkish orange fabric leftover from my Glycocalyx project and started to "decorate".  The auction quilts are always a fun time to play with interesting stuff so I got out my iron-on fusible foil, and my markers and paint pens.  My mom gave me some of the foil while I was home and she was de-stashing.  I added it to my existing foil collection and in the process was prompted to use it.  I haven't done any foiling in many years, not since making some small Christmas light tree quilts back in 2014 and 2016. It was fun to use, and I love the shiny reflectiveness of the foil.  It's hard to see in the pictures, but the gold and teal are foil.

These also served as the first "art quilts" I quilted on my new sit-down longarm.  The quilting went really smoothly, and I even quilted the backgrounds with metallic thread which is always tricky.

This is the finished 12x12.

And this is the finished quilt for the Spotlight Auction.  Again, it's very small (6x8), really just like a slightly oversized postcard.

Each of the bugs is quilted slightly differently, and it was so fun to make them.  It had been a long time since I had fun quilting and sewing so these were a delight to work on.  The bug shapes were a great blank slate for doodling with color and quilting.

Sometime soon I'll be sharing what I did with the actual bugs.  Have you made any bug or spider or creepy crawly quilts?

I like 205

Welcome to another week of things to like! While our friends in Colorado were dealing with the massive snowstorm (what a winter for extremes!) we had nice spring weather hear this weekend.  Yesterday and today have turned back cold and really crazy windy, but I guess that's just March for you!

I started cleaning up the "garden" outside this weekend and uncovered this delightful large toad!  He was huddling under some debris, but I was glad to see him!

The pups are good, they were enjoying sunning in the warm weather this weekend.  Spooky keeps eating things (ahem furniture) that don't belong to him, but is otherwise fine.

I made my donation quilt for the SAQA spotlight auction this weekend.  It's a great fundraiser for a great organization,  I'll post about it again once it goes live.  The quilts are 6x8 and bidding starts at just $20.  I started by printing out (on fabric) one of the micrographs I took of my grandpa's grass specimens from his lab notebook.  This one is a picture of the infertile spikelet of Andropogon scoparius.

I painted it with watercolors and then quilted it and couched sparkly thread over it.  I like the way it turned out!  I hope someone else likes it too.

I also finished some knitting this week and started new knitting!

I finished a pair of socks I'd been knitting this winter.  The legs and tops of the feet have a heart pattern on them but the yarn is so busy they're a little hard to see.  They're nice and cozy though so that's good!

Yesterday I shared this green quilt on instagram for St. Patricks day.  It's really more springy than St. Patrick's day, but I guess green is green.  It was one of my very early quilts from 2012, back when I was doing a lot of experiments with precision cut vinyl silk screens.  My work has become a bit less traditional since then, but I love the bright colors and quilting on this still.

I hope spring is coming for most folks and that our snowed in friends can unbury soon and stay warm in the meantime!  Click over to LeeAnna's for more things to like!

Red White and Blue Quilt

 Some years ago I inherited a bunch of small squares, HSTs, and flying geese from someone (I can't even remember who).  They were clearly a started-then-abandoned project, but I don't think I had all of it.  I couldn't let the piecing be permanently abandoned, so back in April I pulled them out and decided to use them up in something.  I didn't really want to make any more blocks, it was definitely a design-with-what-you've got thing, but I did make a few more HSTs with some of the squares and added some of my own fabric for background.  

I've made red white and blue quilts before, including a very early (c. 2007) cheater lone star made out of HSTs (the mismatched stripes in the center drive me bananas) and a real lone star I made for Mike a few years later in 2011.

But I really much prefer bright clear colors for piecing, and all the fabrics in this set were sort of shabby chic style (by which I mean everything was faintly beige).  Lots of fun prints, just not my color style.  In the second picture below you can see two brighter blues on the bottom to HST stacks, that's only because I didn't have anything in that beigey RWB colorway and needed to add in a couple more HSTs. 

Here's what I put together,  it's kind of a weird shape, ~55"H and 38" W, but you could use it as a baby or lap quilt.  It's a little ruffly on the edges since I didn't block it, but quilting it was fun.

It's now folded up in my donation cupboard waiting to find the right place to donate it.  I'm glad to have gotten all those pieced blocks out of my stash!

Guest Quilts: Kennel Quilts

My mom is an art quilter just like I am, but recently shared some fun charity quilts she made.  They're called kennel quilts, and its a great way to support efforts to care for displaced and needy pets after natural disasters.  You can find out more here:  http://www.quiltpatternmagazine.com/program/KennelQuilt/#Current

These small quilts are collected given to shelters and rescue organizations who are providing assistance with animals after hurricanes or floods or fires or other events.  They can be a great way to use up orphan blocks or other small projects that have been languishing in your studio!  Here are a few cute ones my mom made and sent off after the Houston flooding. 

This is a great organization that has helped out after a bunch of different natural disasters, so if you're a pet lover and have some free time, make up a few and send them off.  There are some basic guidelines at the bottom of the website as well as areas of current need.  

Pieced Quilts

I have a friend at work who is having a baby fairly soon, so this weekend I buckled down and made a baby quilt for her.  Baby and charity quilts are about the only piecing I ever do, so it was fun to do something a bit different.  I decided to make a large churn dash block after seeing Mary's really cute churn dash table runner.  My rule for things like this is that I can't buy new stuff- I have to use what's on hand, because I really have plenty.  It does mean I don't have much in the way of kid-type prints, but I think the colors are bright and fun enough for a baby.  And I backed it with this great fish print that I have several yards of (thanks Georgia!!).

While I was at it I decided to go ahead and finish up a couple charity quilts I'd pieced a long time ago and never quilted.   This first one used up a bunch of my favorite prints.  I decided to make it light weight, with no batting, but backed with minky so its very soft and snuggly.  I quilted it and then self bound it.  It finished about 70" x 45" so it's a good lap size.  Sorry the picture is so terrible!

This second one I belatedly realized was much larger pieces of prints, and I think I must have pieced it intending it to be the back of the other one.  At that point it was too late, and I didn't really want to quilt another something that big, so I cut the backing piece in half and used one piece as the top and one as the backing.  After quilting and binding it finished about 50" x 40" which is a good baby quilt size.  Both baby quilts are bound with some pretty turquoise blanket binding I found in my stash.  It was kind of a pain to work with since it can't be ironed very easily, but it gives such a silky finish.

I hope my friend and her new baby like the churn dash quilt, and I look forward to dropping off the other two at one of our local women's shelters.  It's always great to finish up things that have been languishing, especially if they have a useful purpose!

Summer Donation Quilts

A while back I was in a scrap busting mood so I pieced about 6 or 7 baby-to-lap sized quilt tops and backs.  It didn't seem to make too much of a dent in my scraps but I did get to use up a bunch of fabrics that I'd inherited from others and that I probably wasn't going to use for anything else.  Two weekends ago (while my big quilt was trying to soak out the blue dye), I got my act together and quilted a couple of them.

On this one, the center block is pieced out of little triangles I had left over from another baby quilt.

I love the scraps of fall-scarecrow-tree panel in this next one.

This third one was just random scrappy squares, and I quilted it a while back but it had been sitting on my shelf since then.

I'm going to take all three of these to infant crisis services where hopefully they can be given to babies and kids who need them.  I've been frustrated with my big project lately, so it was really nice to finish some cute things and feel productive!