Ommatidia Finished

I shared earlier this week the process that went into making my giant bee head quilt and today I'm back to share the final piece.

The outside is covered wtih foss shape and it was really great to scuplt with.  It was fun to stretch and heat and staple and pad until I got it to a shape I liked.  It's hard to tell but the eye sockets have some depth along the outer edges and the whole thing is taut and stiff.  I love the eyebrows that sort of got unexpectedly incorporated as I was dealing with excess fossshape.

Ommatidia, c. Shannon Conley, 2025, 32x32x14

I really love the way it turned out, in particular the rainbow of colors in the eyes (the ommatidia) against the white of the main face.

I love the color movement in the test tubes across the surface of each eye.

Here you can see the ridges around the eye socket and the eyebrow a bit better.

One challenge is that the proboscis sticks down below the internal structure which means it can't sit flat upright on a table.  It has to either sit upside down (on top of its head) or flat on its back.  It turns out to be 26 pounds which is quite heavy, but I got a french cleat and it hangs fine from that. 

For a while after I hung it up with the french cleat I wasn't 100% sure whether it would stay on the wall so I moved a big soft dog bed under it.  At first I kept the dogs off (lest a large bee sculpture fall on them) but after a while it seemed stable so Blue joined the picture. 

The piece is currently on display (along with several others of mine) in a mixed media exhibition at the Capitol Rotunda Gallery at the New Mexico State Capitol.  The lighting techs for the show did the most amazing job I've ever seen- somehow they managed to light the bee head so that the shadows it casts look like wings and body.  I could never have expected something so awesome.  If you happen to be in the Santa Fe area (through December 21, 2026), stop by the capitol and see the show. 

We've all been joking that the bee is silently judging everyone who walks by.

 

New Art Quilt: Ommatidia

A few years ago when we were cleaning out some old labs in preparation for moving to some new ones, I brought home a bunch of lab consumables that were going to be tossed. A bunch of the 1ml serological pipettes made their way into this piece  but I still have a lot of would-have-been-trashed supplies.  This included three boxes of small (~5" long) glass test tubes I'd just been waiting for the perfect project.

When the SAQA call for pollinators came out, I decided I wanted to do something inspired by the compound eyes of bees.  Compound eyes feature thousands of little individual focusing units rather than a retina made up of millions of cells with a single cornea/lens in front of it.  Each of these individual focusing units is called an ommatidia.  

In the end, the piece didn't get into the Pollinators show, but it was so much fun to work on, I'm thrilled to have done it.

I got out all 750 test tubes, and covered them individually in a rainbow of fabrics from my stash.  Each one is like a little sleeve (or test tube condom).  I used silks, hand-dyes, polyesters, prints, lots and lots of mens ties, and other random shiny scraps I had sitting around.  Getting them all sewn and turn and stuffed with a test tube was a good mindless task and I only broke a few.

They're all the same size, they just look different because of the panorama picture.

I decided to sew them on two different pieces of quilt sandwich (with fosshape instead of bating) in the shape of an oval eye, with the test tubes sewn on in rows.  Each little sleeve had a couple of inches of extra fabric below the glass, so I just snugged my free motion foot up as close to the glass as possible to sew them down in rows.

They were pretty floppy- this was one of the "eyes" after I'd sewn down all the test tubes, and it was pretty fun to flop them back and forth.

To make the eyes protrude a little, I put a bundle of chicken wire behind each eye and then stiffened the fossshape around it.

Then to make the test tubes flop a little bit less, I stitched down this flexible edging stuff I bought at lowes a long time ago and figured I'd use for something sometime.

I mounted each of the eyes to a piece of plywood to have shape and then connected them with a hinge, so it would look like eyes looking out of the side of a face.

To start shaping the face around the eyes and cover up the silly navy blue floral print, I quilted a large piece of foss shape and draped it over the whole sculpture.  By cutting out eye holes, stuffing paper under the fabric, trimming the plywood a bit, and then stiffening the fosshape I sculpted the bee head shape.

This was a super fun project, delightful to work on and fun to problem solve on.  I love the kind of project where you have an idea and have to make up how to accomplish it as you go along!  It's so fun to use unconventional and "rescued" materials.  I still have a bunch of test tubes left (they're a different size) so I'm sure they'll appear in another project going forward!

Come back on Wednesday to see the final piece.

 

Knitting Updates- Purple Poncho and Rainbow Sweater

 I've had very little time for quilting the last few months, it requires being home and having enough mental fortitude to be creative, but I have done a fair amount of knitting.  

After finishing my dinosaur cardigan, I decided to cast on another sweater using the same top-down sweater book.  I'm still in a stash-yarn phase, so I pulled out some rainbow bamboo pop yarn I inherited from Trish and added some leftover green from some socks and a little bit of teal.  The rainbow was busy enough I just wanted a little pattern up top so I used the DNA from the science doodle pack.  

I wanted a short sleeve slouchy fit shirt, so I added a bunch of increases going down the body to have a loose comfy fit.  The pattern was for full-length sleeves, and for some reason I was paranoid that the sleeves were going to angle up weirdly on the outer part of the arm so I added a bunch of short rows to that part of the sleeves. I made it as long as I had yarn since it was a yarn using up project and did a 3 stitch I-cord bind off which I really like for sweaters.

In the end there was no need for the sleeve short rows and now it looks like the sleeves have funny little tabs on the outside edges, but that's ok.  It's super comfy and light weight for summer, and I love the bright colors. 

I also recently finished this purple poncho made from some wonderful Mothy & the Squid hand-dye I picked up on a trip to Scotland a few years ago.  I had originally intended to make it for me, but I received a purple poncho from a friend not too long ago, so I decided to knit it for my sister who loves purple.  It's super light-weight and lacy, so a great overlay layer for air conditioned rooms.

Definitely one size fits most,  you can see it below on me and on my sister.  The pattern is the Irish Sea Shawl on Ravelry and it was a quick, one skein knit. I really like the over-the-head shawl style,  so often my other shawls fall off, so I might knit another one of these for me in a different color.

I hope you have all been able to do some fun fiber activities lately!

New Art Quilt: High Desert Monsoon

 Last fall, my mom visited me in Oklahoma City and brought with her this amazing book "The Art of the Fold" by Heidi Kyle.  It focuses on methods for making innovative origami books, boxes, and other structures.  My mom got interested because she's been doing a lot of block carving and wanted a way to fold some of her print pages into books.  But of course I've been interested in adapting origami techniques into art quilts for years so I immediatley ordered a copy.  

While she was here I experimented by making this one-piece, three-chambered box out of a piece of quilted batik/tie-dye. It went really well (I can't believe the repeating patterns in the batik lined up in the three chambers so well, that was completely unintentional.  It now sits in my studio gathering miscellaneous things that need to be put away.

When my copy came, I was intrigued by a five-chambered single piece structure and decided to implement it using various scraps of hand-dyed/printed silk I've made and collected over the years. Here you can the shape of the piece flat; each section is the same length, but narrows in width.

When it's assembled you can pull through tightly to generate very small openings, or loosely to create stacked structures.

I'd originally thought to just display the piece as shown above but it was quite small and just felt unresolved.  I loved the rainbow of southwestern colors, so decided to add some of the fluffy acrylic yarn I have in my stash (thanks Georgia!!)

It's so delightful to pet the yarn and run your fingers through it.

High Desert Monsoon, c. 2026 Shannon Conley, 49"x37"x3" 

It's called "High Desert Monsoon" and it makes me think of the smell and colors and sky after the glory of a summer rainstorm in the mountains of New Mexico where I grew up.

It's currently on display (along with several other pieces of my work) through December 21st 2026 in the Capitol Rotunda Gallery at the New Mexico State Capitol.  If you happen to be in Santa Fe, stop by and see the show, it has fabulous mixed-media work by about a dozen artists.

Finished: Kyrie Eleison

Earlier this week I shared about carving and printing the central tesselating blocks and word blocks that go around the edge for my newest liturgical quilt, and today I'm back to share the final piece.

Lord Have Mercy, c. 2026 Shannon Conley, 43"x38"

The gold diamonds were printed separately and appliqued to the rest of the quilt.  I tried to give a little additional color variation to the main tesselating pattern by using different colors of blue, turquoise, and purple thread.

Here are some closeups of the words spiraling around the outer edge "Kyrie Eleison, Christe Eleison, Kyrie Eleison"

Unusually, I struggled a lot with my silk quilting thread,  I'm afraid some of it has gotten quite old, and has been sitting in my sun-filled studio on a wall-mounted thread rack for several years.  I had a ton of breakage with this quilt, so it was much less fun to quilt than usual and the back is terrible.  But it's done now and I've put all my silk thread in a dark box for storage.

The artist statement reads: Part of my ongoing series of liturgical quilts, this piece features a tesselating, interlocking pattern in the center, made using hand carved block prints, and reflecting the interconnectedness of all life on earth. The Kyrie Eleison (Lord have mercy) swirls around the outer edge in an ever continuing plea for mercy, compassion, and forgiveness as we, as individuals and societies, continue to fail each other and fail our planet.

 

New Art Quilt: Kyrie Eleison

As many of you know, I've been working on a series of liturgical inspired quilts for a long time (over 10 years) and am nearing the end of the series.  To be honest, I say that, but probably there will be a phase 2 if I had to guess, I love making them, and I have more in my brain to come I think.

Anyway, I started this is one over Thanksgiving last year at my mom's.  She's been doing a bunch of truly amazing block printing and block carving, and I wanted to try some myself, especially with the idea to make some tesselating patterna.  However when I got to her house, I realized I could just start with this block I'd already carved back over a decade  ago in a Jean Wells Keenan workshop.  It started out rectangular, but I cut off the corners to make a 60 degree diamond and then used the little cut-off bits to fill in the small 60 degree triangle.

This is the pattern the diamond block made.

 

I decided to print on one of my pieces of shiny white polyester (thanks Georgia!)  The printing colors gradient shifted from blue in the middle to purple around the outer edge.  My printing is not lined up well, that's definitely something that takes tons of practice.

The outer diamonds are going to be filled with the words "Kyrie Eleison, Christe Eleison, Kyrie Eleison" rotating around, so I carved those word blocks, and then printed them when I was back in New Mexico over Christmas.

Come back later this week to see the finished piece, and in the meantime, please enjoy this fantastic hand embroidered sheep my mom made many years ago.  Every time I walk down the hallway I want to scratch his nose!!

I love getting to do so many fun artistic explorations when I'm at my mom's!