Mammals of Oklahoma

I spent most of the month of January working on a new art quilt for an entry that was due the end of the month.  After much scurrying I "finished" enough of it (i.e. faced and turned) to take pictures for the entry.  Just recently I finally actually finished it, with the facing, pocket, and label hand stitched on.  Those last steps sometimes just feel like they take forever!

This project was for a call for textile posters, and asked artists to consider all of the uses to which posters have been put over the years.  I had originally thought to do something medieval to fit in with my illuminated manuscripts series, something along the lines of hear ye hear ye.... but nothing really sparked my interest.  As I thought about it, what kept popping into my mind were natural history posters.  You know the ones with the beautiful botanical/scientific illustrations depicting a bunch of different types of insects, or insects, or shells, or mushrooms, or even dragon eggs.

I'm not an illustrator or painter in this style at all, but I decided to reinterpret this idea using a sort of graphic design approach kind of like what I've done in the past.  I decided to re-work the design I'd used for my quilt Ring Around the Mole.  In my brain this has always been called Mammals of Oklahoma, and I'd always wanted to do something else with the design that could incorporate more of the background information.  A poster seemed like the perfect opportunity.  It took quite a bit of refinement and editing on my original digital file, but I wound up with this.  I do my designing in Adobe Illustrator which is ideally suited to this kind of thing, but it's fairly involved.

I had spoonflower print it on microsuede so that there would be some visual interest.  It's free motion quilted with 100 weight silk thread, similar to the original and with a double batting so that the animals might puff up a little bit.  I wasn't sure how the microsuede would quilt, but it turned out fine.  Very smooth actually and much easier than much of my work that is made out of really weird fabrics held together with lots of layers of fusible.

Mammals of Oklahoma, 32" x 48" c. Shannon Conley, 2017

Mammals of Oklahoma, 32" x 48" c. Shannon Conley, 2017, detail

Mammals of Oklahoma, 32" x 48" c. Shannon Conley, 2017, detail

Mammals of Oklahoma, 32" x 48" c. Shannon Conley, 2017, detail

As I final step, I beaded all of their eyes, which adds just a bit of sparkle and dimension.  I'm pleased with the way this turned out, although in my mind it feels flat compared to the original quilt which used fabric.  The print quality was very good, but I think in future I might incorporate digital prints into things with more other types of fabric as well.

Linking up as always with Nina-Marie and Happy Friday to everyone!  Also linking up this week with Free Motion Mavericks.

Bloggers Quilt Festival: Ring Around the Mole

Welcome to anyone clicking through from the always fabulous Bloggers Quilt Festival.  Super shout out to Amy for hosting and organizing it all!  I'm entering two quilts, this one in the Home Machine Quilted category.

It's called "Ring Around the Mole", and is an original design I made using primarily adobe illustrator.  It features one or more mammals from each order/superorder represented in Oklahoma (the state where I live).  My mom came up with the name and it really struck my fancy.  Not least because the moles are the hardest animal to identify so I think having them in the title really helps.

Ring Around the Mole, Shannon M. Conley, c. 2014 62" x 62"

This is the label.

In twelve-days-of-Christmas fashion, there are:

32 bats
20 armadillos
20 prairie dogs
16 opossums (with 64 baby opossums)
16 mice
12 rabbits
8 moles
4 bison
4 deer
4 bobcats
4 coyotes
(but no partridges or pears....)


Construction
The quilt is constructed entirely from apparel fabrics.  The only 100% cotton fabric used was for the backing.  It's mostly different silks and polyesters in all kinds of weaves including velvets, and some weird microsuedes (which I think are also polyester).  I also painted and used some evolon, a non-woven stuff that feels gross but looks pretty cool and is easy to work with.  The white/ivory background is a polyester bridal satin.

Each animal has a beaded eye, except the mice who have thread eyes, and the moles who have no eyes at all.  Even the bats each have two little black bead eyes you just can't see in the picture.

The quilt contains two layers of batting, one layer of cotton and one layer of wool.  It was all free motion quilted on my janome horizon 7700 home sewing machine.  All the background quilting is 100 wt. YLI silk thread (if only I could afford more of this).  The quilting on the animals is mostly 40 wt polyester (glide and isacord are my favorites).  It was actually quilted twice- the first time the animals were quilted with only the top and a single layer of batting.  Then I layered the second layer of batting an backing and quilted the rest.  This way, the animals puff in a faux-trapunto way, but still have thread quilted detailing.

The final quilt is 62 x 62 and is finished with a facing contoured with the shape of the bats.

View of the back.

This was been a fairly emotional and draining project for me, and I learned a lot about things and ways of doing things that I want to avoid in future.   I really hope you enjoy seeing it!  Many thanks to my dad Doug for taking all the pictures, it's a really hard quilt to photograph.

For more info on this quilt, check out my other posts on it, and be sure to check out all the other Blogger's quilt festival entries!

Show Announcement: Beyond Tradition

Hi all, I just wanted to pop in to say that I have several pieces in a SAQA New Mexico regional show called Beyond Tradition.  It's being held at the Hubbard Museum of the American West in Ruidoso Downs, NM and runs from April 5-September 1.  If any of you are traveling through southern New Mexico, you might check it out!

I'm privileged to have three pieces hanging in Beyond Tradition: Winter in Lincoln County 2: Sierra Blanca, Winter in Lincoln County 1: The Orchard, and Ring Around the Mole.

Concurrently hanging at the museum are A Walk in the Wild and A Color Runs Through It, so you can also see Seymour the Coelophysis, Taming the Gorgons, and Black and White and Read All Over.

Many thanks to Betty Busby who has worked really hard to make this happen, and also to everyone else who helped including my super Mom who has been the local contact for it.  

The First Finish of 2014

Having just arrived back from the holidays, my blog reader is full of wonderful year-in-review posts and goals-for-2014 posts.  I may share something like that but today I wanted to share the first finish of 2014.  As regular readers know, I've spent the last two and a half months working on this every single free minute, including vast quantities of time finishing it up at my parent's over the holidays (beading all the eyes took forever).  I'm really pleased with how it turned out and super glad to have been able to leave it in New Mexico (the first show it's going to is there) since I now have no more ability to putter with it. My design wall is empty and my brain is going to take a break.

I'm calling it "Ring Around the Mole".  My mom came up with the name and it really struck my fancy.  Not least because the moles are the hardest animal to identify so I think having them in the title really helps.

Ring Around the Mole, Shannon M. Conley, c. 2014 62" x 62"

I feel like I've been so busy working on this quilt that I haven't had much time to talk about it.  So a few details.

Design
This is an original design I made using primarily adobe illustrator.  It features one or more mammals from each order/superorder represented in Oklahoma (the state where I live).  They're listed on the label which looks like this:

In twelve-days-of-Christmas fashion, there are:

32 bats
20 armadillos
20 prairie dogs
16 oposusms (with 64 baby opossums)
16 mice
12 rabbits
8 moles
4 bison
4 deer
4 bobcats
4 coyotes
(but no partridges or pears....)


Construction
The quilt is constructed entirely from apparel fabrics.  The only 100% cotton fabric used was for the backing.  It's mostly different silks and polyesters in all kinds of weaves including velvets, and some weird microsuedes (which I think are also polyester).  I also painted and used some evolon, a non-woven stuff that feels gross but looks pretty cool and is easy to work with.  The white/ivory background is a polyester bridal satin.

The animals were cut out based on my illustrator vectors using either my silhouette cameo or by hand.  They're all fused and machine appliqued down.  Each animal has a beaded eye, except the mice who have thread eyes, and the moles who have no eyes at all.  Even the bats each have two little black eyes you just can't see in the picture.

The quilt contains two layers of batting, one layer of cotton and one layer of wool.  It was all free motion quilted on my janome horizon 7700 home sewing machine.  All the background quilting is 100 wt. YLI silk thread (if only I could afford more of this).  The quilting on the animals is mostly 40 wt polyester (glide and isacord are my favorites).

The final quilt is 62 x 62 and is faced in contour with the shape of the bats.

This has been a fairly emotional and draining project for me, and I've learned a lot about things and ways of doing things that I want to avoid in future.   I really hope you enjoy seeing it!  Many thanks to my dad Doug for taking all the pictures, it's a really hard quilt to photograph.

Blogger informs me this is my 300th post, which just feels like a lucky numb

I'm linking up to TGIFF at Quilt Matters, Nina-Marie's Fabulous Art Quilt Linky, and Richard and Tanyas.

The Quilting is Finished!

Last night at about ll:45 I finished the quilting on my mammal mandala!  Hooray!  Here are a couple of snaps of the back- I love the way you can see the animals in relief.

Now for the extremely large task of soaking and blocking (soaking always makes me nervous) and then binding.  I'm going to do a facing which is contoured to match the edges of the bats (rather than a traditional binding) and I expect the process to be a nightmare.  Who knows, maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised!

Still Quilting

Coming up for air again long enough to share some pictures.  I'm making progress....

Quilting

I've been quilting, and quilting, and quilting.  Coming up for air only long enough to post a couple pictures before I dive back in....  Hope you're all well!

WIP: Update on the Mandala

I've been working pretty hard on my mammal mandala lately and haven't really stopped to blog much!  Lucky for you that means you'll be spared a few intermediate in-process posts.  Inspired by something I noticed during one of Caryl Bryer Fallert Gentry's lectures, I decided I'd try to take pictures of this from the same angle at a bunch of different developmental stages (do I sound like an embryologist?).  I'm probably the last person in the whole of internet land to try it, but here's my very first animated GIF documenting my progress so far.

And, in case you want to take a look at it without all the flashing, here's the final frame alone.

I decided I wanted to quilt the animals first on a single layer of cotton batting prior to layering with wool batting and the backing.  I think (hope) it'll give a sort of faux trapunto look in the end, but we'll see.  I'm not going to cutaway around the animals, so I'll have to get all the background quilted down tightly!

I'm headed to New Mexico for Thanksgiving and want to baste the whole thing together on my mom's long arm (to hopefully avoid any dreaded puckers), so I needed to get the first round of quilting (with the single layer of batting) done first. I spent all weekend on it, and aside from pretty sore shoulders and upper back, it went ok.  Unfortunately, at some point I quilted over this flyer which must have fallen off my bulletin board.  I'm not sure if you can tell, but it's cardstock and is pretty densely quilted down.  Ripping it out (the flyer not the quilting) is on my list, but will not be fun.

Anyhow, wish me luck with the no puckering on the back!  I'm going to link up with Nina-Marie and Lee as usual.  Have a great week everyone!

WIP: Thursday, Progress on the Mammal Mandala

I mentioned a couple weeks back that I've started working on my next large art quilt.  It features mammals of Oklahoma cavorting in a medallion. I showed the initial design for it here and have since been working on refining the design and color scheme.  I've learned a ton about vectors and adobe illustrator along the way (just jumped right into the deep end), and it turned out to be a great choice for this design.  I think vector-based designing will likely fit into a lot of my future work.

My new (to me) favorite color inspiration website is Design Seeds which is filled with fabulous color palette inspiration.  I love colors and tend to want to use them all, so it was new and challenging to try to start with, and keep to, a defined color palette.  After looking at bunches of them, the one I kept being drawn to was this one:

Succulent Hues, Design Seeds

Because of the fabrics I found, my palette actually ended up being a more saturated version of this (who's surprised there), but having it as a guide at least was really helpful.  I'm using a bunch of different fabrics: dupioni silk, silk-look polyester, hand-dyed (not by me) silk velvet, polyester velvet, some funny looking synthetic polka-dot stuff, some faux suede surface stuff (same thing I used on Seymour's bones), something labeled "crinkle satin", and hand-painted (by me) evolon (which nicely doesn't ravel).

For many of my animals, I exported the vectors from illustrator and used my Silhouette Cameo to cut them out, as in the picture of the prairie dogs below.

 
 For those cut out of silk or silk-look polyester I'm sealing the edges with the woodburning tool.  I discovered after much trial and error, I can't get the silhouette to cut velvet, so the animals cut out of velvet are all cut by hand.  The big animals are also all cut by hand since they're too big for my cutting mat.

I'm finally to the point of putting some of the animals onto the background piece here are the first three circles pinned up.  It gets more complicated after this since the animals start overlapping, so wish me luck as I try to fit the puzzle together!

In the last one you can see how big the whole thing is- I have a ton left!

I'm linking up (belatedly) with WIP: Wednesday and as ever with Nina-Marie!

WIP Wednesday: Mice and Other Mammals

So many things have happened lately, both on the life front and on the sewing front, that blogging has had to take a bit of a backseat.   In addition, many of the things I've been working on aren't to a stage that involves good pictures.

Weekend before last I was lucky enough to get to make a quick trip to St. Louis to see Quilt National and meet up with my quilty electron microscopist friend Barb who lives there.  We had a lovely lunch and really enjoyed seeing the show.  Only about 10% of quilts entered get in, but my goal is to throw my hat (er quilt) in the ring for the next time which will be 2015, so ideas for that project are percolating in my brain.

Also fun, last night I got the catalog for the SAQA Text Messages show in the mail.  It was so exciting to see my quilt there in the book in living color.  The show is opening at IQF in Houston, and I can't wait to see it in person.  Based on the catalog, there are some really fabulous quilts in it.

In not quite so exciting news- we're currently struggling with a mouse invasion in our house.  I work with mice in my day job so they don't bother or frighten me, but it's really startling to see one scurry across the bathroom floor out of the corner of your eye as you brush your teeth, and I do not want them eating through my walls or wiring.  I'd tried to catch it for a while with no success, and when I realized it wasn't a lone mouse (is it ever?) I went ahead and got some traps.  As of this morning we've caught 8 (most in the garage); hopefully there aren't too many more.

On the sewing front, after a couple of weeks I've finished sewing my Halloween costume for this year.  My mom and I are going to a Halloween party at IQF, so we decided to dress up together.  She doesn't usually dress up, but found a Grumpy dwarf costume in the closet she made 25 years ago (ouch!) to trick or treat with us.  My sister and I, in turns, wore a much beloved Snow White costume (you can see my sister wearing it here), and my mom suggested I go as Snow White again this year.  I'll share pictures of us both dressed up when I have them.

Now for the good stuff- I've finally started to get to work on my next two art quilts.  The first is what I'm mentally calling my mammal mandala.  It features at least one mammal from each of the orders represented in Oklahoma.  So far I'm just in the design phase, but here's what I have so far.  It's going to be about 60" square made with a variety of construction techniques.  As usual I'm going with the "figure out what you want to make first and then come up with a way to actually make it" approach.  Incidentally the colors in the design have no relationship to the colors I'll use in the quilt, they were just what I happened to select when making my vectors in illustrator.

The second quilt I'm working on is based on an electron micrograph of some photoreceptors taken for our lab by the aforementioned Barb, and is a slightly smaller project.  I'll share more about it next week.

So what are you designing lately?  Any Halloween costume sewing going on? Can you tell what the mammals are?