Seed Heads 2-Finished

 Earlier this week I started sharing about a new pom pom piece, and today I'm back to share the final piece.  The final piece, called Seed Pods #2, is 54" x 35" x 3".  It hangs from a regular pocket but I had to use a thicker than usual slat and also stitch a pocket for half a pool noodle along the bottom of the quilt so that it didn't flop weirdly because of the depth of the pom poms.  The pom poms stick out half on the back and half on the front.  They aren't stitched in, just pushed through the small holes I cut in the quilt.  They are quite secure and can be adjusted if needed.

The piece used only five colors of yarn to make the gradient, yellow, purple, teal, grey and pink.  Making the pom pom gradient was the next part!  It's called Seed Heads 2 because it reminds me of dandelion seed heads.

Seed Heads 2, c. 2023 Shannon Conley

This was a super fun color blending project, and I look forward to thinking of other things to do with all this wonderful yarn!

New Pom Pom Quilt

 I have tons and tons of this fuzzy pastel acrylic yarn that my friend Georgia gave me (Hi Georgia!!), and it's not really that great for knitting and couching so I've been thinking what to do with it. Earlier this year, I made a little pom-pom quilt for the SAQA Auction (going on now!  Go bid and get cool art!)

I had a really fun time making this gradient of pom-poms with some of the yarn, and thought I'd try to make a bigger version.

I did a bunch of graphing out my pom poms and colors on graph paper, with instructions for each one on how many strands of each color it should have.  It was really delightful to watch the gradients come into being as I made the pom poms.  While making them, they each had a little tag corresponding to their place in the grid, but I took all the tags off as I put them in the quilt.

My grid was 7 x 9 so there were 63 pom poms.  Even after making them all I don't really think I made a dent in the yarn, so clearly additional yarn-based projects will be forthcoming.

I liked the brown background from the auction piece, but I didn't have any more of that dupioni silk fabric, but I pulled this piece of weird, kind of fuzzy chenille-like brown fabric that was in a box of stuff destashed to me by my sister's mother-in-law (Hi Mary Alice!).  I marked my grid, quilted and faced the quilt, and then cut out all the little circles to stick in the pom poms.  The texture of the fabric went really well with the pom poms actually.

Come back later this week to see the finished quilt!