I like #164

Welcome to another week of things to like.  Our labs opened back up this week, so I've been working in my office/lab a little more which has been nice.  Still working from home as much as possible, but it's good to be back at work some.  Luckily our lab is big and isolated and there aren't very many of us who work there so we can stay separate.  I made masks for all the girls who work for me so that was fun.

The best thing to like this week is my mom!  Happy mother's day mom!  She's really the best.  Of course we weren't together, but I dug through and found some old pictures of her with us to send for mother's day.

I love this one-  she made the matching dresses and blouses for us, and that blue car in the background was super exciting,  it was my mom's first new car back in the early 80s, and my first car period (no longer new) in the mid 90s.  It's part of why I wanted my new subaru to be blue.

And I love this one too!  More of my mom's sewing at hand-  she made the prairie dresses for us for a school play, I'm not sure what it was, but we dressed up as Laura Ingalls Wilder with the same dresses for Halloween that year (I think that's what this picture is from).  Love you mom!!!

I didn't take very many pictures this week, but the dogs are good, and my flowers are good.  I did dig the petunias out of the dahlia pots and put them in a different place so that was good.  I started a new project based on a polar dendrogram, and it's been the perfect thing to use some of my hand painted fabrics and precious scraps.

I also blogged about a couple more backlogged projects,  I'm nearing the end of those, so hopefully soon I'll be to current projects!  The crocheted wrap is something I finished over Christmas, but the flame quilt is quite recent; I finished it at the end of March, so there's hope of catching up.

I hope everyone is staying safe!  Click over to Lee Anna's for more things to like!

Thorns and Spikes-Lantern Flames

My mom recently started up a small art quilt group centered on people in the Four Corners region.   It's pretty new, but our first call for entry was titled Thorns and Spikes.  I immediately thought of all the quilts I've made that incorporate aluminum window screen and how scratchy and annoying it was to work with that.  I wondered whether I could incorporate that as "spikes" somehow in my piece. 

After displaying my large flowers at the NM Capitol in 2018, I decided to cut up the Bromeliad piece because I just wasn't happy with the overall shape of that one.  Since it was one that had incorporated the aluminum window screen, I figured now was the time to repurpose some of it into something else.  The original piece had a layer of painted velvet as the front, then a layer of batting, then a layer of window screen, then the backing fabric all quilted together.   One of my goals in this piece was to at least partially expose the spiky edges of aluminum, so I started by cutting out flame shapes, and then carefully picking out the quilting along the edges.  I then trimmed away the front fabric, batting, and backing fabric, leaving only the windowscreen showing.

Fort the background, I found this pale yellow gold shawl scarf thing that had bunches of pleats sewn into it with gold elastic.  I have no idea where it came from, but I loved the texture.  I stretched it out to the required width (20") and fused it to some leave-in interfacing before painting it and quilting it.  The last step was stitch on my five spiky thorny flames!  I picked areas out of the original quilt to cut up that had subtle color variations and quilting variations, and I love the way it turned out.  The binding is maroon velvet,  and in case anyone is wondering, yes it is a very dumb thing to try to make binding out of.


Here you can see me cutting out flames from the disassembled bromeliad quilt.

Those are my "quilting" gloves,  very grippy!  This is the piece mid-quilting, after stretching and painting.

Lantern Flame, c. Shannon Conley, 2020, 30" x 20"

Unfortunately, these pictures had to be submitted by a March 31st deadline (yes I am VERY behind blogging), and of course I didn't finish until two days before.  With the social distancing coupled with Mike's recent knee surgery, I wasn't able to have Mike take my pictures.  He lent me his camera, but even so my pictures aren't nearly as good as his are.  Oh well!  Here are some closeups.

Here you can really see the spiky metal edges sticking out!  One nice thing about the shapable window screen is that this piece can be rolled for shipping and subsequently "fluffed up" in contrast to the kirigami quilts which just aren't flexible in that way.

Cotton Candy Shawligan-Crochet!

Well once again I am many many months behind blogging.  I have no actual idea when I started this,  the earliest pictures (of me balling the yarn) are from February 2018, and the pattern file shows I saved it in January 2018, so I guess sometime around then.  I started it because I wanted an "idiot crochet" project, something easy to work on while chatting or watching TV.  It's definitely easy (the same two row fan pattern), and because it's long it does provide for a LOT of idiot crochet time.  The pattern is nicely written and easy to follow, you can find it as a free download from ravelry here.

I got sort of bored with it after a while, and around mid 2018 is when I really started switching almost fully back to knitting because crocheting was giving me tendonitis in my elbow.  In addition, this was supposed to be a carry along project (to work on while waiting or traveling) but it soon became to bulky to easily carry.  So basically this project languished.  But even though it was simple crochet, I really wanted to have the finished piece to wear.  The soft pink yarn is sort of heathered looking,  I have no idea what it is, some sort of acrylic I think, but it has a very nice look and feel.  It came from the magical Georgia yarn tree of course.

One downside is that you crochet one side out from the middle and then work the other side out from the middle.  This means that after you have made one side X length, you are then forced to keep going until the other side is that same length.  Argh.  Anyway, I used my time over Thanksgiving break and Christmas break at my mother's last fall to finish it up.  I used up that entire giant cone of yarn!  I love using things up from my stash.  And I've really enjoyed wearing it this winter.

Apparently I took no in progress shots at all-  I have this picture of me balling the yarn off of the cone and then nothing else.

 Blue was "helping" while I tried to take the pictures.  It was a windy day, so we had lots of blowing around.  I love the long sides on this piece, they swoop like a cape when walking.  They're almost a little too long though and I have to pick them up when walking up stairs.

It's meant to be long enough to wrap around oneself, and it's very warm worn this way.  I wore it double wrapped like this on cold days this winter (secured with a shawl pin in back) and it was nice and cozy.

I Like #163

Welcome to another week of things to like.  Still sequestered at home, although our research labs are implementing phased opening next week, so starting Monday I'll be back in the lab more.

This week I discovered a quilt artist named Sarah Sharp, and was really drawn to this piece Winter Shadows

Sarah Sharp, Winter Shadows

I almost finished my latest illuminated quilt, and I'm so pleased with how it's turning out.  I still need to do a pocket and a label but hopefully I'll get to that soon.  I did the edge finishing in kind of a weird way, at some point I'll write a couple posts about the project, but here's a peek at the finished edge.

This bright pile of thread made me really happy this week; it was just what I'd gotten out as I quilted, but it looked so bright and cheerful.

One of the ladies who works in my lab is a new graduate student who is midway through getting a full sleeve arm tattoo of all nerdy science things.  I'm not a tattoo person particularly, but I am definitely a science nerd, and the artistry in her tattoos is pretty fabulous.  When I went into work earlier this week she showed me the newest section, a rat, and I fell in love with it.  

I like pies!  I made a lemon meringue pie for Mike to thank him for coming over to take pictures for me. I over-toasted the meringue, but I ate a piece before giving the rest to him and it was still tasty.

The pups are good!  Wonderful and snuggly!

My petunias are blooming like gangbusters and all my other plants are growing too.  I may need to dig some of the petunias out of the dog food sacks since I think they're crowding the dahlias.  I'll probably do that late this afternoon or tomorrow.  

I blogged this week about two projects I finished before quarantine (I had a huge backlogged of unblogged things), one was another kirigami quilt, and one was another wooden sculpture.  Click the links to see more about them.

I hope everyone is staying healthy and safe!  Click over to LeeAnna's for more things to like!

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

Drum Geometry

When I was a kid my mom taught me to draw these little curved shapes using only straight lines.  I had lots of fun making all kinds of drawings.  I've come back to the idea several times as an adult; in 2012, I used the curved stitching approach to make a little mini-quilt for my mom, and in 2016 I made string art valentines.  

While recently exploring things I could make out of wood using the laser cutter I got excited by ways to make the wood pliable and easily curved.  The first time I really thought about this was when I made the wooden box for the Christmas nativity that had a flexible lid.  I started looking around and found a bunch of different patterns to make flexible wood cutouts. 

 My original idea was to have a round outer wooden frame, and then use the concepts from curved stitching (i.e. straight stitches to make curved shapes), but I didn't have any way to make the outer lattice work stay round.  It kept breaking (where the two segments joined together) and generally behaving badly, so I made a frame to hold it together.

Even with the frame, getting everything to be round and square was tricky.

Here it is after I started stitching my string pattern in the middle.  I decided to do five different sizes of string patterns, and though there are lots of different string patterns you can make, lots of them require anchor points on places other than the edge of the circle.  I used different colors of crochet thread, and It was time-consuming to do all the lacing, but luckily it went more smoothly than my other two wooden sculptures!

Drum Geometry, c. Shannon Conley, 2020

I like the way it turned out, I love the patterns generated with string, but overall the wood structure feels a little simplistic.  You can tell I'm not a sculptor!!

On the outside I stitched some of the non-circle string motifs.  These are the first I learned, but are drawn on an XY axis rather than circular backbone.

I Like #162

Welcome to another week of things to like.  We're still staying and working from home, and in spite of various things reopening here in OK, the university hasn't made official noises in that direction.  In general, I think people here are taking this a little less seriously than I might wish, but I was very pleased to see that at least half the people were wearing masks when I made my grocery trip on Saturday. Certainly many more than when I'd last visited three weeks earlier.  And of course a grocery trip Saturday means that the last few days have been full of fresh fruit and veggies and I've especially been enjoying the good asparagus.

Other things to like:

I like this hand soap my sister brought me on her trip to Newfoundland a couple years back.  I was excited to use up the annoying little sliver and get out this fresh bar.  It's designed to mimic the look of the row houses in that particular village, but I got a great laugh from the use instructions.  I'm not sure you can read them, but the label says: "To use: wet soap, lather on skin, and rinse."  I'd never have thought hand soap required instructions, but the proliferation of recent handwashing instructions clearly shows this soap to have been ahead of its time. 

Blue and I went walking around the lake this weekend.  The weather was nice, and even though there were other people out, everyone was generally very good about keeping distance from one another, so we had a nice walk.  Bentley got a short walk around the neighborhood first but he gets tired too fast for long walks.

I've been continuing my sort through of old pictures as part of a big digitization push and found this one of a very early hiking and camping trip.  In 1983, when my little sister was only about 8 months old, my mom and two of her life-long girl friends took all us kids on a camping trip to Yosemite. There were four little bitty kids ranging age from 8 months to about 5.  I'm the one in the pink tracksuit (some things never change) and was right around my third birthday, and that's my sister in the backpack with my mom.  My mom tells lots of great stories about the trip, including one where they almost missed the last bus out of the valley at the end of the afternoon and the three ladies had to pick up all the kids and run some large number of miles to make it in time.

I got my copy of the Vision 2020 catalog this week.  This show is touring around the US and Australia (or hopefully will be at some point) and is filled with cool quilts on that theme.  You can see a really nice online version of the full exhibition catalog here. 

I loved this mosaic piece.  It's irridescent

That's my quilt there on the left.

I kept quilting on my big illuminated quilt this week.  Here's an in progress shot showing my pumpkin dog.  She was a great big lug of a hound dog who one time stole my sandwich right out of my hand, but she died about ten years ago.

I also posted about two new sculptural experiments using wood this week.  You can see more about my paraboloids here and here.  I was grateful to cut the wood for these on the laser cutter right before the facility shutdown for quarantine.

I hope you're all hanging in there this week.  Please visit Lee Anna's for more things to like this week.