New Quilts: Origami 1

 I'm still so far behind on blogging, but I am committed to catching up.  Today I'm sharing some pieces I finished last spring for our most recent past show at the New Mexico State Capitol.

I've always loved origami and in in December of 2023 I signed up to learn how to do origami tesselations with Madonna Yoder at Gathering Folds.  If you have any interest in origami tesselations I strongly recommend her site.  

I decided to see if I could make some origami tesselation quilts.  The hardest part of any origami with fabric is the difficulty with holding crisp folds but I wanted to give it a try! I started with some very lightweight semi-sheer swiss dot fabric and painted it with a light wash of paint.  I quilted two layers together, but did not include batting since I knew the batting would make it even harder for the pieces to hold folds during the origami process. 

I marked the fold patterns with washable marker and began folding.

My tiny binder clips were essential during the folding process.  After I was done with folding, I stitched down all the folds with hand stitching, but during the folding process I couldn't have done it without the binder clips.  The folding process was definitely challenging,  when you do these with paper you make a ton of pre-creases for the fold lines which really helps with the folding.  I ironed in the precreases but every time I ironed one crossing over a different one, it flattened the first one!!

This is my first finished quilted star, and I love how different it looks from the front vs. the back.

One of my favorite things about these folded stars is how you get a very different effect when light shines through.  That's why I selected a semi-sheer fabric to begin with, but the piece has to be back lit to see this.

I decided to mount the piece to a fabric covered light box so it could be displayed with our without back lighting.  Unfortunately I couldn't find any light boxes to buy, so I made them.  It turned out to be kind of a fun project!  A little bit like building cool things as a kid with my electricity set (thanks dad!).

Here is the final piece with and without the back lighting (and after getting rid of all the dreadful marking lines).  I think it came out really fun and I enjoy having them hang in my office now that the show is done.  I really love the effect of the quilting stitches and how you see them as part of the design when it's backlit.

Origami 1, Shannon Conley, c. 2024, 26 x 26 x 2

I actually worked on two of these pieces in parallel, come back next week to see the other one!

New Quilt-Summer in Lincoln County 2024

This was a 2024 quilt that I never got around to blogging about, so I thought I'd share it here as we get going into 2025.  I was doing some small smocking quilts in preparation for filming an episode of Quilting Arts TV and decided to use this vibrant red-orange velvet as my base fabric.  Normally I paint my quilt tops when they'll be smocked or whole cloth, but at first I thought I'd just use the solid red.  Unfortunately, after quilting it, it just looked really flat, so I decided to see what would happen if I painted it.  Usually when I pait my fabrics, I start with something fairly light colored, so I wasn't sure what would happen when I tried to paint the strong dense red. 

Here's how the piece looked after painting, and the second picture is the back.  I was very intrigued by the colors I got using green and yellow paint (the backing fabric was white so the colors you see in the second picture are from paint that came through the quilt.  Very interesting.  And definitely hard to get color on top of the very bright red velvet.

But I really liked the red with the dark blackish looking accents- it felt like smoke coming off a fire.  And 2024 was definitely a summer of fires for my family, both as individuals and in my parents' community. I decided I'd make a smocked quilt using this fabric and enter it into the Primal Forces: Fire exhibition.

Above you can see the pattern marked for the smocking, and below you can see what the back looks like as the smocking is in progress.

Here's the finished quilt.  The strong red was really hard to photograph, everything was just so saturated with that eye searing red, but I think you can get the idea.

Lincoln County, Summer 2024, c. Shannon Conley, 2024, 37" x 25" x 2"

The artist statement reads: "The 2024 fire season in Lincoln County, New Mexico, was devastating, burning great chunks of Ruidoso, the town I grew up in.  As the climate in the American southwest continues to get drier, the fire seasons get longer and more severe."

It didn't get into Primal Forces: Fire, but I expect at some point I'll send it to something else.

New Quilt-Chinle Formation

 Our art quilt group had a call titled "4 Common Corners: Rocks" and even though I live in Oklahoma we were all supposed to be inspired by some rocky something in one of the 4 corners states.  I picked the Chinle formation which forms part of the beautiful red striped badlands in Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument.  

In parallel, I'd been working on knitting the Goji shawl pattern (here's a picture of it) using some hand dyed yarn I bought one year at the kelyville fiber festival.  I loved the 3D little undulating bits.  They reminded me of bird nests or caves something, but I didn't really need another shawl like that. 

It was pretty bulky yarn, and I wound up with three fairly small pieces of knitting, but I really loved the texture.  I felted them all so they'd feel more like fabric.  Unfortunately one more skein of yarn I'd added in from my stash didn't wind up felting properly, so I couldn't use it.

 However I was struggling with how to incorporate the knitted pieces into a quilt.  It just didn't feel like enough, so I started experimenting with little limpet/barnacle shapes I made out of quilted cast-offs to complement the knitted pieces.  

At first I tried laying them out on a white quilted background, but they just didn't feel right so in the end I painted the background to feel sort of sky-and-rocks-ish and then stitched all the dimensional elements on the top.

It's not my favorite piece ever but it filled the brief and I love all the 3D elements.

Chinle formation, 2024, c. Shannon Conley, 40"H x 30"W x 3"D

The artist statement reads: "The Chinle formation is a Triassic-era geological formation that spreads throughout the 4 Corners region.  In many parts of the Colorado Plateau its colorful stratigraphy is exposed in classic regional landscapes, forming stripey red rock formations against the clear blue southwestern sky."

All Good Gifts-Finished

 

Earlier in the week I shared about a new quilt in my liturgical series, featuring a collect calling us to be good stewards of God's creation.  Today I'll share the finished quilt and some more about the small details.

All Good Gifts, 2024, c. Shannon Conley 58"x 42"

It's called "All Good Gifts" in reference to the hymn, the refrain of which says "All good gifts around us are sent from heaven above, we thank the Lord, we thank the Lord, for all his love."  That's always been one of my favorite hymns and reflects our responsibility to protect and preserve our planet, our environment, and our ecosystem.

There's lots of fun doodling in the quilting throughout, quilting is one of my favorite parts of the process.  Here you can see the rose rocks (state rock of OK) in the top and right border and the scissortail flycatcher (state brird of OK) very "abstracted" in the quilting.

Here you can see a close of up fhte selenite crystals in the large O (our state crystal), with our state grass and butterfly on the left.

The bottom border features the oklahoma state wildflower, Indian Blanket (Gaillardia pulchella) and our state insect the European honey bee.  Funny story about the flowers,  they have graduated red-to-yellow petals so I hand painted the fabric and laid out the cut files so I'd have a lovely gradation of yellow/red along the petals.  Only after I finished all the flowers did I realize I did them backwards.  In real life they're red in the center and yellow on the tips.  Alas.  I guess we'll chalk it up to "artistic license"

I'm so pleased with how this turned out, it fits so well with the others in the series.

New Quilt-All Good Gifts

I've been working on a series of quilts featuring parts of the Episcopal liturgy for many years now (see more pieces in the series here), and this new piece I worked on for several months this year is another in the series. 

Towards the beginning of the service we have a short prayer called a collect, usually it has something to do with the liturgical season, but there are also collects and short prayers for other special occasions.  This one is about our spiritual charge to protect and care for our environment and as I was thinking of what to do for this part of the service, this prayer jumped out at me.

III. For stewardship of creation

O merciful Creator, your hand is open wide to satisfy the

needs of every living creature: Make us always thankful for

your loving providence; and grant that we, remembering the

account that we must one day give, may be faithful stewards

of your good gifts; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with

you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever

and ever. Amen.

I decided to use it for this quilt, and as decoration to include as many of the natural symbols of Oklahoma as I could.  Many of the prior quilts in this series have incorporated symbolism that references my heart-home in southern New Mexico, but I'm a strong believer in preserving native ecosystems even if they aren't as immediately glorious as the mountain west (e.g. the great plains).

I started with this silk (thanks Georgia!) that mom and I dyed last year at Christmas.  We were doing lots of experimenting and I was going for a bluer color but I got this sort of purply shade I've come to really like.  The silk was lightweight with a nice woven pattern that gives some fun visual interest up close.  

I do my desigining in adobe illustrator, and then for this piece, my mom kindly made silk screens for me using her heat machine.  We're never sure whether it's going to make them right or not, but it worked this time and with much care int he aligning, I got all the words of the prayer silk screened onto the surface in gold.

For all the accents, imagery and borders, I pulled a bunch of silky slinky velvety fabrics out and just pinned them all up.  I like using velvets, they add such a richness, but they won't cut on my silhouette.  I just bought a brother scan and cut that is much newer than the silhouette, so in future I'm hoping to be able to cut velvet but we'll see.  For this one I cold only use it places I was willing to hand cut.

After auditioning fabrics, my next step was to do the initials.  The pinkish backing behind the small initials is some handpainted polyester from way back, I think most of it was originally for the glycocalyx quilt.  For the big O at the beginning I incorporated this lovely rose silk we also dyed at Christmas and then filled the O with selenite crystals.  Selenite crystals are a distinctively Oklahoman crystal (they're actually the state crystal) and during certain times of the year you can go dig for them in the salt flats. 

Of course I didn't take very many in process pictures, but the top and right borders feature these rose rocks.  They look sort of like abstract roses, but are actually the barite rose rocks that are also so characteristic of Oklahoma. They're the state rock and also very fun to go and hunt for.

On the left border I featured the state grass of Oklahoma, Indian garss (Sorghastrum nutans).  To be honest, it's pretty abstracted.  I'm not sure you could distinguish it from any other kind of grass but the idea is there!  In the border I added our state butterfly, the black swallowtail, as though it were flitting gaily through the grass.

I didn't get any pictures of the bottom border in progress, but come back later in the week to see the final quilt!

New Quilt: Galaxies, Suns, and the Planets in Their Courses

 The second call this year for our art quilt group 4 Common Corners was "Improv at the Corners".  I was initially struggling with this, I don't really do traditional "improv" but settled into it as an opportunity to explore something I'd been thinking a lot about, namely what to do with the "outer edges" that are left over after cutting shapes out with my digital cutter.  

I make quite a few quilts that use the digital cutter to cut out fusible applique shapes, and I'm always left with all these scraps that are tiny, weirdly shaped, and have fusible on them.  But often they're some of my favorite hand dyed or painted fabrics so I hate to toss them.  The net result is that I have several large baskets of these scraps and I decided to use some in this project.  As with most scrap projects, after doing the whole project you can't even tell that I used up any (based on how many are still left), so maybe this is motivation to do another one (or two or three) of these.

I selected a bright blue shiny background fabric and sketched out only the broadest sort of shapes.  I was inspired by the shapes of nebulae in the night sky, but only very very loosely.  

Here are a couple of in-progress pictures.  Each main element (whether coral or teal) was surrounded by a band of dark navy bits, and then I filled in the background with gold bits.  I wind up with a fair amount of gold because a lot of the precision cutting is for my illuminated manuscript series and I use a lot of gold in that.

A lot of the red and coral bits came from my boxelder bug quilts, so there are a lot of antennae and bug shaped outlines in there.

The blues and corals are from a wider range of projects, but a lot of them are from my original mammal mandala from 2014.  You can see lots of outlines but also a possum and some possum babies that didn't make it into the original quilt.

Here's the finished piece. The gold background all came from my Lord's Prayer quilt, and in a few places in this quilt you can actually make out some words from the Lord's Prayer. 

Galaxies, Suns, and the Planets in their Courses, c. Shannon Conley, 2024, 31x31"

I love the way this turned out.  It was fun and flowed freely, and I'd love to do some more like this.