New Mandala is Finished!

My new mandala is finished you guys!  Its official name is "Ring around the Ranch" in honor of both the previous one (Ring around the Mole) and Josal Ranch, owned by the wonderful couple who commissioned the project.  I'm so excited to have finished it and delivered it to the clients.  They love it, so I consider it a job well done.  I finished it right after Christmas so it's a 2014 finish, but completing it feels like a great way to start 2015.  I've blogged about it a bunch, so there are tons of in progress pictures if you want to click back through them.

One feature I really like is the secondary patterns in the quilting.  You can see them a little bit in the overall picture, but also in some of the detail shots.  Th large nine-pointed star and nonagon in the center (around the robins), and the large arcs that frame each corner.

Ring Around the Ranch, 2014, 57" x 57" c. Shannon Conley

Here are a few detailed shots of the large corner birds.  I had a good time with these birds.  They're one of my favorite parts of the piece.  I think I like the crested caracara (bottom turquoise one) best, but the owls are a close second.    For those of you that remember the wretched holes, I patched them with the bo-nash powder and quilted over them and you really can't see them at all.  They're right above and below the beak on the left heron.

As before all the animals have beaded eye or face details.  On some of the larger animals it's more than one bead (to give some shape) although they're quite hard to see in the photos.  My mom said the stray green threads kept catching her eye but when she'd reach up to pluck them off, she'd realize they were catfish whiskers....

Blue Heron Detail, Ring Around the Ranch, 2014, 57" x 57" c. Shannon Conley

Red-tailed hawk detail, Ring Around the Ranch, 2014, 57" x 57" c. Shannon Conley

Crested Caracara detail, Ring Around the Ranch, 2014, 57" x 57" c. Shannon Conley

Great Horned Owl detail, Ring Around the Ranch, 2014, 57" x 57" c. Shannon Conley

Here are a few shots of the areas with most of the overlays.

Detail, Ring Around the Ranch, 2014, 57" x 57" c. Shannon Conley

Detail, Ring Around the Ranch, 2014, 57" x 57" c. Shannon Conley

Detail, Ring Around the Ranch, 2014, 57" x 57" c. Shannon Conley

 And finally, a couple of pictures of the center.  The logo in the middle is their ranch sign/brand.

Detail, Ring Around the Ranch, 2014, 57" x 57" c. Shannon Conley

Detail, Ring Around the Ranch, 2014, 57" x 57" c. Shannon Conley

And here's a picture they sent me of the quilt hanging in their home.  I love the way it looks on the rock wall, and the warm colors in those two brown birds go very well with the bench!
 

Ring Around the Ranch, 2014, 57" x 57" c. Shannon Conley

Many thanks to the Kanetzky's for supporting my work.  Now it's off to the 2015 projects!  I'm linking up with the fabulous Nina-Marie as always!

Merry Christmas!

I'm still busily plugging away at the to-finish-before-Christmas projects, but we've started celebrating already here and I'm trying to lighten up a little bit.  Good Christmas music and time with Mike have helped!

Many apologies to those who are tired of seeing this quilt, but I think only a couple more posts and it'll be finished!  I've finished quilting the new Mandala, and am now working on beading the animal eyes.  After that it's just binding and adding the label and pocket then this one can go off to its new home.

And finally, a gratuitous dog picture, because everyone needs one of those.

Wishing you all a joyful and peaceful Christmas and holiday season!

Quilting Progress

I've been quilting along on my new animal mandala, you can see some of the progress below.  I've also been working on some projects for Christmas and trying to find the advent spirit amid the stress and chaos whirling around.

Last night, Mike and I drove around to look at Christmas lights- this is one of my favorite traditions for the two of us.  As always, the lights at Chesapeake were lovely.

Two messages from my advent calendar in the last week that particularly struck me.  "In the 6th century, St. Benedict began his monastic rule with the word 'listen'.  Not a bad word to carry into advent." and "Mary carried Jesus, God's love and truth, into the world.  We can do that too."  I'm trying.

Progress

Many thanks to all those who offered their condolences about my wretched holes!  The Bo-Nash powder was great- it worked exactly as it promised, however, even with the patch, you can still sort of see the holes.  I'm hoping some judicious quilting will help.

Anyway, I moved on.  I went ahead and marked the background for quilting prior to taking the quilt top off my design wall since last time I didn't do it until after it was layered and basted and the puffiness from the batting was a pain to mark over.

I've also now successfully quilted all of the animals to the first layer of batting.  I'm doing this one just like my last one in this respect.  I quilted the animals only on the first layer of batting, and then when I add the second layer of batting and ditch quilt around the appliques/stitch down the background, the animals should puff up nicely.  Many of them are just too big to go without any stitching, and I like the extra detail it provides, but it's more fun if they puff up.  I'm taking it to my mom's over Thanksgiving to baste all the layers together on her longarm- makes it so much easier to quilt on my home machine.

The big birds in the four corners are all quilted with different metallic threads, which makes me happy.

I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Awesome and Awful?

Hooray for progress on the new mandala!  The top is finished! 

And then, there's this.  This happened last Saturday as I was attaching the last animals.  Only now after several intervening days have swear words stopped coming out of my mouth (sorry for the bad attitude, but ACK).  I don't know if you can tell, but this is four holes in my quilt top.  From my iron. After days of working with the iron on this quilt with no problems.  I'm refraining from screaming in all caps in the blog post only because who wants to read that?

I've ordered some miracle Bo-Nash powder and generated some test holes.  The only thing I can do is try to patch it with the Bo-nash from the back.  If that doesn't work, who knows what I'll try. What a mess.

Progress on the new mandala

Lately I've been busy working on my new mandala quilt and it's been really wonderful to make some good progress.  I started this project back in the summer (blogged here) but haven't had much time since August to work on it.  The first step after completing all the computer design work was to start cutting out all the animals, so that's what I've  been doing.  Unfortunately lots of the colors didn't photograph well, but you get the idea.  So far it's going well, but the hard part is getting the overlays cut and lined up, and I haven't started those yet.

This was my original messy fabric pull, some were kept, others not.

Catfish

Cardinals

Bunnies

Squirrels

Deer (antlers still to come)

Ponies

Longhorns (horns still to come)

Chocolate Labs

Great Horned Owl (head still to come)

Red-tailed Hawk (tail still to come)

Blue Heron

Crested Caracara

New Mandala Quilt

You guys may remember my quilt Ring Around the Mole, completed earlier this year.  It's been hanging at the Hubbard Museum of the American West in a SAQA exhibit, and I was recently contacted by some people who wanted to commission a similar quilt, but with different animals.

Ring Around the Mole

I met with them and worked up a design they liked so I'm moving forwards.  It's the first time I've made a second quilt in the same vein as a prior one and I'm trying to track how the two compare. The design process took about as much time as before, only two of the animals (the armadillos and the deer) were the same as in my project, but I didn't have so much difficulty with Illustrator as I did last time.  Designing Ring Around the Mole was really my first foray into vector graphics and designing a quilt that way, so it helped this time around to be much more familiar with the software.

Here are three different colored versions of the new design.  The clients wanted their ranch logo in the middle and then cardinals, squirrels, rabbits, chocolate labs, armadillos, horses, longhorns, deer, catfish, great blue herons, crested caracaras, red-tailed hawks, and great horned owls.  If I've done my job correctly, you should see all of those below!  One thing that stood out to me this time was the bird feet.  My first quilt had all mammals, so there weren't any bird feet, but it was quite challenging to draw all the different bird feet for this one.

They liked the middle version of the coloring so I'll be using that as my starting spot for finding fabrics.  A lot of the precise colors will depend on what I find, and of course the colors will be much more vibrant and textured in fabric than in the drawings.  As before, I'm going to have to be careful to prevent it from getting too busy, but I think I'll be able to find a balance.  I'm excited to be starting something new, and it was fun to mock up a design for someone who I knew really liked my quilts.