New Quilt-Grateful

My blogging catch up continues!  Last week I blogged about my two ice quilts which I actuall made and finished this summer/early fall.  More recently I decided I wanted to try to make a piece for the SAQA call for entry called Minimalism.  I'm not exactly a minimalist but I'd had this idea for a white quilt with intertwined rainbow ribbons in my brain for a while and it seemed like the time to try it.  I'd never really been sure how I'd make it, whether I'd piece or applique something, but I decided after doing this yarn-covered Alleluia Alleluia piece earlier in the year that I would do it using couched yarn. 

I started with a blue fabric/batting sandwich and first couched down all the rainbow ribbons using stash yarn.  

My goal had been to use all stash stuff for this project, but I decided that I should have one color of white yarn for the background and since the quilt is fairly big, I did buy a new skein of inexpensive white acrylic yarn.  I started filling in the background- you can see below that I just sort of meandered around couching down the white yarn until the entire piece was covered.  

There are letters in the white yarn, it says "I will be grateful for today."  In the picture below you can see the word today at the end, but the words are very subtle and hidden in the final piece because they're couched in the same color as the rest of the background.  I think it's a good mantra, although I'm not always that good at remembering it.

This happy guy joined me for one of my marathon saturday quilting/couching sessions!

After finishing the white couching, I went back and put down another layer over many of the colored ribbons since some of them had gotten a bit over-run by the white and were receding into the background.

It was a hard quilt to photograph with all that white, but here are a few detail shots of the final thing.  I enjoyed using different colors of top thread to couch down the white yarn so there are some subtle variations in color across the background. 

It took quite a while to fill in the entire quilt with courched yarn, but I find quilting to be very calming and meditative, and I enjoyed the process a lot.  I love the texture that comes from the yarn!

Here's the final piece, it's 48" wide x 31" high.  I have no idea whether it will get into the show, but I'm pleased with it and very much enjoyed the process.

I Like #255

 Welcome to another week of things to like!

This has been a week of catching up on the home front which has been great.

I blogged about a quilt I finished a few weeks ago, you can more about it here. 

I was also pleased to have two pieces in shows that opened in Colorado this week.  My piece Cloud Rim: Summer 1991 is part of Evolutions at the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum in Golden, and luckily my mom was able to attend the opening reception and two of our friends (pictured with mom below), Diana Fox and Bev Haring won big awards (CONGRATS!!!!!!!).

This is my mom with her piece

Mom and I also had pieces in the invitational show Slopes, Shapes, and Landscapes at the Lincoln Center in Fort Collins, and Mom was able to go by and see it too.  Both of these will be hanging for the next couple of months, so if you're in the area, stop in an check them out.

My piece, Topography II: Crest trail is there in the middle of that wall below.

That's one of my mom's quilts above on the left, and all three of the quilts below are hers.  She had quite a few pieces in the show.  I only had one, but I don't make identifiable landscapes all that often.

Lots of things are blooming, these small poppy things are outside my building at work.

In my garden the dahlias are just starting to come up, but my petunias are doing great.  Such a blast of bright color.

I got my garage cleaned out this week; in theory I'm supposed to be getting my car back sometime soon and we're in the middle of storm season so I needed to be able to get both my car and my mom's car in my garage until I can get her car back to her.

The boys are doing well, I did a fair amount of knitting this week and they both wanted me to stop and play.

I hope you're all having good things in your lives this week.  Click over to LeeAnna's for more things to like!

New Quilt: Alleluia Alleluia

A couple months ago, while I was working on some more complicated quilt designs I decided to start something simpler so I could just have something to sew on.  It was right around the time when I was really trying to get used to my new longarm so a lot of quilting was appealing to me.  

I started it right at the time when Russia invaded Ukraine, and it was so heartbreaking (it's still heartbreaking), and I wanted to try to do something colorful and hopeful.  I decided to start with the phrase we use as our dismissal in church, which seemed fitting since going into the world in peace seemed like something we needed. 

After drafting the pattern, I pinned it down to a quilt sandwich and stitched around the letters in light grey thread.  You can see in the picture below, the very light thread outlining the word And between love and serve.  After outline stitching the words, I tore off the pattern and started quilting.  Instead of regular quilting, I decided to try out free-motion couching using some of my stash yarn.  It was so much fun and worked really well with the free-motion couching foot on my machine.  All the freedom of free-motion quilting but with the bright thick line of color you'd usually associated with fabric and paint.

The color story was largely dictated by the yarn I had on hand, but you'll notice the same blue and yellow we've been seeing all over recently.  After doing the letters I started outlining them and then just kept filling in.  I didn't really care about the color of the background fabric since I planned to cover the whole thing with yarn.

You can actually see in the picture on the left that there's a bunch of regular quilting along the left side; that's because this started out as a big practice quilt sandwich that I decided to use for a real quilt!

After steadily filling and filling and filling until it was all covered, here's the final piece. The edges were finished with zig-zagged couched yarn.  It took a long time to fill in the background, but it was very restful.  Easy to quilt on for 20 or 30 minutes at a time.  All the extra yarn makes it fairly heavy, heavier than you'd think from the size of it (it's 39" x 25")

Here are a few closeups.

Alleluia, Alleluia, c. 2022 Shannon Conley

I really enjoyed this couching process and I'll probably use it again in future.  And now this slightly psychedelic quilt can take its place in my series of liturgical quilts.

I Like #253

 Welcome to another week of things to like!

Very scary news first though,  my parents' town, Ruidoso New Mexico is having a big wildfire right in the middle of town right now.  My parents are safe now and the fire is largely moving away from them but several thousand people have been evacuated and current estimates are that ~150 homes have burned down, including some belonging to friends of theirs.  It's so scary, and there are other similar fires burning in other parts of New Mexico right now too.  Please keep them in your thoughts, it's been so windy and dry.

I finished Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson this week and I thought it was very good.  Definitely recommend to anyone who is a fan of his writing. 

I don't get new music very often, but I did buy Brandi Carlile's newish (2021) album this week, In these Silent Days.  It's great,  I love her music.

In sorting through my phone pictures this week, I realized I have a couple of yummy small projects I finished in the last few weeks that I forgot to share!  

One is this small birthday banner I made for my Grandma who turned 93 in late March.  Love you Grandma!!  I'd been playing around a bunch with couching yarn on my longarm, so it was fun to do a small piece.  

I also made a small bag for my new laptop a little while back.  So far I'm not too pleased with the laptop but I like the bag.  It's made out of rainbow glitter vinyl and the inside is lined with this super fun rainbow lab glassware fabric.  It was very tough to turn, but I think it cam out nice.

I got a bunch of science stickers recently, and my very favorite was this adorable mole-in-a-beaker.  

The pups are doing fine, Spooky took the outer cover off the green dog bed, and then made blue sit on the empty cover while he sat on the inner cover (that was still filled with comfy dog bed).

So far my garden is doing absolutely zilch apart from the petunias (which fill in so nicely), but the dahlia seeds I started are doing well!  Here in a little while I'll plant them in the ground outside.

I hope everyone is hanging in there!  Click over to LeeAnna's for more things to like!