New Quilt: The Monsters

 Back in 2022 my mom was working on a quilt of all our many rescued dogs over the years.  She made  custom silk screens for many decades of family dogs and printed them on pieced fabric blocks.  Her quilt turned out great; it's called "Best Beloved".  This isn't all our family dogs, but it's most of them from the past 50 years.  Only a couple are missing,  notably my parents' dogs Kachina and Marigold, but really she got almost all of them. 

From top left (those with * have gone over rainbow bridge): Swatch, Jackson*, Jordy*, Maggie the elder*, Gibby*, Cab*, Auto, Fawn*, Skunk*, Mac*, Taxi*, Maggie the younger*, Swatch and Shooter*, Blue, Wrinkles*, Shooter*, Missy*, Pumpkin*, Calais*, Bentley*, Bullett*, Spooky, Talute*, Checker, Jenny*, Angel*, Boo* and Cassie*, ?, Pepper* and Peanut*, Strider*

Shortly after she made all the silk screens, I was at home visiting and decided to use her process to make one of Brett's dog Cash, and made this wall hanging for him as a birthday present.

But at the same time I decided to make a few prints of the dogs of mine that were on mom's quilts.  Making the screens was a lot of work for her and I thought they were super cute so I went ahead and printed plain blocks featuring all of my dogs that she'd had on there figuring some day I'd do something with them. 

Not too long ago I was desperately searching for something else (not tellin what at this point) and came across the blocks and decided I should just make them into a quilt.  They weren't doing any good sitting in a drawer and I love seeing the pups and I loved all the bright colors.  In the same drawer were a bunch of English Paper Piecing flowers I'd started years ago and I felt like their scrappy fun vibe fit with the blocks.  

A few years ago I had been into EPP for handwork, but the needle wound up hurting my hands and I set them aside in favor of other handwork, mostly knitting and embroidery. But I had several put together and a bunch more cut out and in little baggies.  I just wound up piecing all the leftover ones together by machine and then using them for this project.  I named it The Monsters because that's what I (lovingly) always call the pups.  I love all the bright colors and rainbow threads and flower garden blocks and especially the pictures of the pups.

The Monsters, 2025, 40x40 c. Shannon Conley

Bentley*

Spooky

Bullett*

Missy*

Blue

Shooter*

Pumpkin*

Angel*

This is just a happy quilt.  I'm so pleased to have made something fun with the blocks and to have it up on my wall so I can see all my monsters whenever I walk into the room.  

Cottonwood: Finished

 Earlier in the week I shared about a new quilt I recently finished inspired by the cottonwood trees we were surrounded by during a recent 4 Common Corners retreat.  today I'm back to share the final quilt. 

After finishing the piecing, I quilted it with largely abstract quilting surrounding a central tree quilted into the background.  It's quilted pretty densely, mostly because I like quilting but also because with the differing weights of fabric it turned out pretty bubbly.  This was defnitely a "quilt it out" situation.

I'd originally thought about incorporating some pom-poms but once I finished it I was happy with it as-is and didn't think it needed any added stuff.

That purple fabric with the hexagons is one I printed,  I love that fabric and only had some small pieces.  So happy to get to use it.

You can see here I had a hard time turning the thick eduges right at the top of the central peak.  But I loved getting to use the random orange and green striped velvet I dyed a while back.  The yellow and purple is silk I also dyed.  The yellow with the tiny polka dots in the top right is from an old necktie.

Here you can see the branches a little better in the quilting.  I also enjoyed adding a little blue in the quilting and piecing at the top to evoke the New Mexico sky.

Bringing forth life and giving growth, c. Shannon Conley, 2025, 50"H x 39"W

In the end the quilt gave me the feel of the tunnel of leaves with light shining through, but also the feel of a stained glass window.  It makes me feel joyous exploring God's creation and I decided to name it "Bringing forth life and giving growth" from Isaiah 55:10-12

For as rain and snow fall from the heavens
and return not again, but water the earth,
Bringing forth life and giving growth,
seed for sowing and bread for eating,
So shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.
For you shall go out in joy,
and be led back in peace;
The mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song,
and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.

Isaiah 55: 10-12

In the end, the piecing isn't perfect and there are a few spots where that really bugs me, but I love the glow and the colors and I love seeing all my wonderful fabrics out and shining.

New Quilt: Cottonwood

 Our 4 Common Corners call for the first third of this year was Cottonwood, inspired by our retreat last year in northern New Mexico up near the 4 Corners Region.  

We were there in October and the trees were in all their gorgeous yellow glory along the river that flows behind the place we had the retreat.

I had lots of pictures of the trees, but I decided to take a more abstract approach.  I actually started with all these gradient pom poms I'd made but never done anything with and thought I'd make a quilt in yellows and oranges and then accent it with the pom poms.  

I had this abstract idea in my head of tree branches arching overhead in a tunnel of natural beauty, so I drafted a fairly simple pattern and decided I would paper piece/string piece with oranges and yellows and use purples and browns for the "branches".  

It's all weird fabrics, velvets, upholstery fabric, silk, pseudo-suede, weird melty non-wovens, and whatever other non-cottons I found in the scrap bins.  I foundation pieced it on fusable interfacing.  One main challenge was that the fabrics varied radically in weight making it challenging to piece and quilt but I got there.

It was reall fun to use up lots of scrappy stuff from the stash,  just looking at these pictures I see lots of fabrics samples I've painted, dyed, and printed over the years and I love seeing them incorporated into something. 

Come back later this week to see the final quilt!

Christmas and Winter Bag Making

 In the last couple of months I've done a little bag making in between other projects.  This is something I enjoy.  I started by making myself a new wallet.  My prior one, though much beloved, was completely worn out.  Because I'm 100% a little old lady apparently, I wanted one that had both a zip pocket and a place for my checkbook.  I made this one out of some rainbow vinyl and dinosaur fabric in my stash and it fills me with delight.

Last year sometime I found this wonderful crazy knitting fabric and fell in love with it.  I love the style of the design and the color palette was gorgeous.  I don't usually buy new fabric but I couldn't resist and snagged some of this.  I made this fairly large knitting/project tote for my knitting friend Kristin's birthday this January.  There's still enough left to make another project bag so that'll probably be on the radar at some point.

She's also a scientist so I lined it with my happy lab glassware fabric.

Finally I made this new clutch purse/wallet for my sister for Christmas.  She and my mom both really like this pattern which is from the Greenback Wallet Trio from Sew Sweetness.  I've made them several over the years,  when one wears out I just make another.  The outside is some purple cordouroy from some pants I'd worn out but had been saving for something just like this, and I couldn't help putting some more dino fabric inside.

So a fun few bags over the last few months, but probably no more for a little while, I'm trying to focus on big quilt projects while I have a little bit of time.

 The 2025 SAQA Spotlight Auction is coming up very soon!! This annual fundraiser is held in conjunction with the SAQA annual conference, this year in St. Petersburg Florida, but the auction is open to anyone.  The pieces are quite small, so it's a great way to add to your art collection!

For more information on how to participate, visit the SAQA Spotlight Auction Page.  The auction will open for bidding from March 26-April 5 on the Handbid platform.

My donation this year actually started out as part of an exercise we did with Judy Chaffee.  The idea was to pick a famous painting and break it down by color and by the amount of each major color, and then use those colors and their amounts in your own small composition.  I'm all about the gold fabrics, so I picked a Gustav Klimt painting. It was fun to try to estimate the colors and find matches in my stash. 

This is my piece for the auction that came out of the exercise. 

Here you can see my color pulls with approximate percentages and the original painting. The painting is called Judith and the Head of Holofernes and was painted by Klimt in 1901.  

It was a really fun exercise, more challenging than I thought to get the proportions of color right.  I think in the end my piece progagly has too much blue and my brown/beige is a little too dark, but otherwise ok colorwise.

The quilts start out 6x8 inches and then are matted down to 4.5 x 6.5 inches, so it will display something like this:

Don't forget to click the link above to participate!  It's a great fundraiser for a great organization.

Christmas Crafting

 I'm still getting caught up sharing the things I worked on during the end of last year during the Christmas crafting season.  

As chronic readers may know, I always make handmade ornaments for friends and family each year and this year I was inspired by a dual desire to use up some of the very pretty and sparkly but awful to knit and crochet with ribbon yarn that is in my stash and to do something with the shells I picked up when my friend Kristin and I went to Savannah.  I considered a variety of things but wound up going with a simple tassel based angel.  Each one is just a touch different but they all have the same components.

Still on the Christmas tree front, I was so excited to get this beautiful handmade spiky ornament from my sister this year for Christmas.  My mom made a bunch of these when she was first married (fifty years ago now) and I've always loved them.  It's wonderful to have a new generation of them made by my sister.

While at my sister's for Christmas day, we had a scavenger hunt for the kids to find their stockings.  One of the steps was that each family member had to build a lego gingerbread person.  I got very very excited by this and had a great time decorating mine.   I think they were designed to be tree ornaments, but I liked mine so much I know have it hanging year round on my car mirror.

Finally, I'm a big lover of nativity scenes, and I decided that my "main" one needed some dinosaurs.  I mean, I pretty much think everything benefits by the addition of dinosaurs and I feel like they would fit in well with the other nativity animals.  I ordered some paint-your-own ceramic dinosaurs from Etsy, and then as a Christmas craft project, Brett and I each painted one to add to my exisiting nativity.  They were pretty good size wise I think.

I painted the t-rex and Brett painted the brachiosaur.

I think they make great additions to the nativity.  The dinosaurs came in a set of six, so we'll paint two more next year.  It's really an eclectic assembled set.  The base set and hut were a gift from my mom when I got my very first apartment about 25 years ago.  And of course the dinosaurs were just added this year.  But the three angels are much much older.  They belonged to my great grandmother.  She was married in 1926, and while I have no specific info on these pieces, my guess is that they come from sometime in the mid twentieth century, 1930-1950 maybe?  Maybe next year I'll see if I can find amy makers marks or anything on them.  In any case all together it's pretty special to me.  Happy (very late) Christmas!