Kirigami #5: Sea Dragons

One of the things I really love about doing these kirigami quilts is that they satisfy my love of pattern, shape, and repetition, all things I love from traditional quilts, while being three-dimensional.

This next quilt was inspired by the colors and shapes of sea dragons,  I love watching them at aquariums, they look so much like plants!  Here's a picture of one I took in 2011 on a visit to the Monterrey Aquarium.

I loved the greeny-purple in their leaf-like fins, so took that idea and ran with it for this quilt.  

The fabric I painted was the same as that I used for the creepy-crawlie piece, only this time I put the red on the back and the green on the front.  I accented the green with purple shiva paintsticks to give color variety.  The cut and folded quilt is stitched down to a purple quilted background, I love the bright pops of quilting that stand out from the rest.  This one was especially hard to photograph, but we tried!

Kirigami #5: Sea Dragons, c. Shannon Conley, 2020, Photo, Doug Conley

Kirigami #4: Creepy Crawlies-Finished!

Yesterday I shared about this latest installment in my Kirigami series and today I'm back to share the finished piece.  Even with fabric stiffener, this piece felt like it needed a little bit of extra support so I attached it (with tiny nails) to a wood backboard.  There were a few baby blue paint accents on the red quilt front, so I gave the board a very light wash with light blue acrylic paint to just tint it in a complementary direction.  I also thought the green arms were a little plain looking so I accented their edges and base with paint and polka dots.

Here's the whole finished piece.  I named it Kirigami #4: Creepy Crawlies, because even though the arms are sort of like pinwheels, the remind me of bug legs!  Interestingly, in normal RES domes, the center circle is raised up off the ground/backing, but even with stiffening, the fabric doesn't have enough structural integrity for the form to stay up, so the arms stick out from the background, but the red center circles are also nailed to the backing board.

Kirigami #4: Creepy Crawlies, c. Shannon Conley, 2020, 18" x 32", photo c. Mike Cox

New Quilt: Kirigami #4: Creepy Crawlies

Welcome to another installment of my series of Kirigami quilts.  This one started with this fabric I painted red orange for the front and dirty desert green for the back.  And of course quilted together!

Ever since I started learning about kirigami, I've been entirely captivated by RES structures (rotational erection system), a method of creating really fantastic 3D geometry from a single flat piece.  Professor Yoshinobu Miyamoto has really pioneered these structures, both from the mathematics side and from the origami/kirigami and architectural side.  I got completely lost in his flickr stream:  check it out here.  You can adjust these structures in a lot of different ways depending on the angle, shape, and size of the cuts and folds.  There are some mathematical programs for designing them that are above my level of understanding, but after looking at millions of pictures I figured out how to draft them.  I made a couple of different ones with different fold depths and angles, just to see what would happen.  Interestingly, a couple of them weren't well suited to application to quilts (I'll blog about those failures at some point).  This one worked well enough and I liked the shapes enough that I decided to make it in a quilt.  I cut the paper model on my silhouette after drafting in Adobe illustrator.

Interestingly, all of these kirigami quilts rely on folding, and fabric does not fold well.  I've discovered that the folds crease better if you stitch them down.  In addition, I wanted to figure out a way to mark the folds using the cutter since many of the folds have very precise angles but you don't want to cut them completely.  I thought if I used a dotted line in illustrator it would cut a perforated line in the fabric and that would serve as a fold guide.  Unfortunately, the laser cutter doesn't interpret a dashed line from illustrator (it reads solid lines only).  So I had to convert the dashed lines into outlined paths which was kind of a pain the first time.  Anyway, it worked out, and below you can see the fully cut solid lines and the dashed cut lines which are for folding.

After cutting, I used paintsticks to add some color and depth to the red sandwich.

Here you can see it "popped up"  the arms are pretty floppy since this is pre-stiffening, but I love all the arms!  Come back tomorrow to see the finished piece!

Kirigami #3: Open Windows: Finished!

Yesterday I shared the in progress pictures of my latest kirigami quilt, and here are the finished pictures.  I loved this quick iphone snap of all three on the wall waiting for mike to come take pictures!

Here is the current one finished.  This time because the front cut piece was fairly small and floppy, I mounted it on a completely separate quilt which was quilted and finished on the back before stitching the cut front piece on to the surface.  The background is a more burnt orange than you can see in this picture,  I really wanted something warm and autumnal to balance out the pink/purple/turquoise of the front.  I love working with the pink/purple/turquoise palette, but it can wind up looking juvenile, so I thought burn orange was a good way to go.  My sister said it looked like half my style (pink and rainbowy purple) and half my mom's style (autumn colors), but that's ok with me!

Kirigam #3: Open Windows, c. Shannon Conley, 2020, 28" x 20", Photo c. Mike Cox

New Quilt: Kirigami 3#: Open Windows

One tiny benefit of being cooped up with no ability to go anywhere is that I've found time to catch up on blogging about projects I've completed over the last several months.  Someday I'll catch up with the backlog and maybe get back to blogging about current projects!!  This is another in my Kirigami series.  This one started with this piece of painted fabric I found in the magic Georgia boxes.  She must have painted it sometime in the past, but it was the right size to cut up and I was glad to be able to use it.  I loved the colors and the strong vertical lines, so I tried to incorporate those into my cut pattern.  Below you can see the quilted sandwich.

This was my paper mockup for this piece but I decided instead of having peaks going on the left, middle and right, I'd have the peaks slowly transition from one side to the other.

Here it is after cutting and sewing the fold creases.  Because each cut bit was so skinny, and because of the general lack of rigidity in the fabric,  these pieces were extremely floppy. After playing with them for a while I decided there was no way I could get them to stand up like the paper mockup.  Fabric stiffener would have helped them stand up, but achieving the nice straight lines you get with paper just wasn't feasible.

I decided on an approach that still used fabric stiffener to give stiffness, but in which the segments were piled off to the side.  This way they could pile up on top of each other making it easier to sculpt.  Come back tomorrow to see the finished piece!

Kirigami Quilt #2-Finished!

Yesterday, I shared the in-progress shots of my latest Kirigami quilt.  Today I'll share some pictures of the finished piece!  One interesting thing about this series is that I've really had to think about the order of operations, because once the piece is sculpted and stiff it's really hard to work on!  This typically means a weird assembly order and putting on "finishing" touches like the pocket and label somewhere during the middle of the process.  The colors on this were accentuated with Shiva Paintsticks and I really like their ability to add subtle variation and emphasize certain shapes.  Each triangle/chevron point is stitched down and then the shapes were stiffened with Golden Fabric stiffener so they stay pooched out.   I'm rally pleased with how this one turned out,  the fairly large cut shapes adapted well to fabric.  I also really liked how the color variation in the painted silk I put on the background played so nicely with both the dark front and beach back of the main piece.  

Kirigami #2, c. Shannon Conley, 2020.  32" x 18"  Photo c. Mike Cox

New Quilt: Kirigami #2

Here's another in my ongoing series of Kirigami Quilts!  Once again I started with plain fabric and painted it thwn quilted it.  I love the bright neon thread on the fairly dark rainbow background. And because the kirigami quilts depend are enhanced by contrast between the front and the back,  the back of the quilt sandwich is the peach/orange/red in the second picture.

This is the kirigami pattern I decided to try.  I liked the shapes made by the chevrons/triangles and it seemed sufficiently simple to adapt well to fabric.  I've enjoyed cutting paper mockups using my silhouette cutter.

Here you can see it after I cut it on the laser cutter.  I like the shapes, but didn't like the white showing through, so I backed the whole thing with a piece of silk I painted last fall.  

Here you can see the turquoise silk backing.  Like I have on previous pieces, I bound the edges using a couched yarn.  In this case, because the cute pieces were fairly big and simple in shape, I also couched the yarn along the edges of the cut triangles.  Come back tomorrow to see the finished piece!!

Petals-Finished

Last week I blogged about the first part of another new dimensional quilt and today I'm back to share finished pictures.  The piece has three panels, and after painting the petals and the background, I hand stitched each one down.  I put PVC pipe under each row of petals and then painted them with fabric stiffener so they'd stay round and perched out.  The PVC pipe also helps prevent them from being squashed in shipping.  (Shipping this kind of work is its own special nightmare).

On one panel the petals curve up, on the other side they curve down, and in the middle half are up and half are down.

I wasn't sure what to name this one either,  the little cutouts remind me of advent calendar windows and little miniature shrines or nichos, but in the end I decided to just go with "Petals" since that was my original inspiration.

Petals, c. 2020 Shannon Conley, 32x51x3, Photo Mike Cox

New Quilt-Petals

Some of you may know that I'm doing another set of cutwork/dimensional quilts, and this is one I finished recently.  My goal was to have lots of pattern and symmetry (like a traditional quilt) but with dimensional/cut out elements.

I started by painting some white crushed velvet in this sort of tie-dye-esque pattern.  I layered it with batting and backed it with a piece of orange silk from a sari.

The piece was big enough to cut into three panels to cut on the laser cutter at OU Norman, so after quilting the sandwiches, I took them down and cut out a bunch of petals.  Below you can faintly see the cut lines.

I loved the orange that peeked through when you folded the petals forward, but having all the same orange made it feel flat, so I used Shiva Paintsticks to add some shimmer and variety to the petals.  Here you can see the backs of all three panels with the petals painted.

Like the previous piece, I decided I didn't want to have white wall behind the petals, so I backed the already quilted piece with pink sari silk, and then painted the little pink windows to give them some variety of color.

Check back on Monday to see the finished piece!