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!

New Quilt: Agua Fria Reimagined

 Last week I blogged about a new topography quilt I designed encompassing the neighborhood where I grew up.  These topo quilts are made based on USGS topographical map, with each layer cut out based on a topo line and then built up on the quilt surface in layers.  One challenge with this is that there's always the "leftover" bits from the cutout. This picture shows the leftover piece after I removed the piece I needed for the quilt I blogged about last week.

The very first quilt I did using this technique was just a small sample, and I actually made two quilts, one which was the inverse of the other.  That way I didn't waste all the little cut out bits. 

It worked fine for that first quilt because it was just an abstract/geometric shape, but for the quilt based on actual topo maps it didn't really seem logical to use the cut out bits since they didn't really correspond to anything?  The leftover bits sort of correspond to something like the air that is inside a deep canyon or something.  The inverse of land? However it takes a lot of work to design and paint and cut all the layers for these projects and I couldn't bear the thought of throwing them away.  So this time, I carefully kept all the ones from the Canyon Road quilt and made them into a new quilt.

It's not nearly as thick as the prior one for several reasons.  First, much of the thickness of the prior quilt came from the fact that on the top sections, many of the layers cover the whole thing (so there was no "extra" to use here).  Secondly, I didn't have enough of my beloved wooden discs to separate the layers, so I used much thinner plastic buttons to separate the layers.

Another difference is that I didn't mount the cut panels onto a quilted background, they just hang freely.  The sections are connected with tulle which is barely visible unles you get right up close.  For example in the picture below, you can see the pale pink tulle connecting the two sections.

Here's the final piece,  I named it Agua Fria Reimagined.  Agua Fria is the name of the neighborhood I grew up in, and of course reimagined because this isn't actually the topography of Agua Fria, more like the inverse of the topography?  Or inspired by the topography?  I was very happy not to waste all the wonderful cut layers.

Agua Fria Reimagined, C. 2026 Shannon Conley, 38"x24"

212 Canyon Road: Finished

 Earlier in the week I shared the process for building another one of my topography inspired quilts.  Today I wanted to come back and share the finished work.  I talked about painting and cutting all the individual layers.  I mounted them onto a quilted and painted base quilt just like I did ten years ago when working on another quilt like this.

Here's the finished quilt.  It's called 212 Canyon Road,  that was the house I grew up in and the map covers the neighborhood and its surroundings.    The elevations range from 6280-7560 ft.

It had a LOT of layers, on the top section there are 18.  It sticks out from the wall a full 5 inches and even with my ingenious wooden buttons (I talked about in the prior post) the top layers were a bit saggy.  I wound up putting wire (from a hangar) inside the top layers to help prevent sagging.  It's been hanging on my wall now for several months (this was another fall 2025 finish) and is holding up great!

Here when it's sitting on my work table you can see how much thicker the top section is compared to the middle and bottom.  The mountain goes up fairly steeply in that area.

212 Canyon Road, c. 2025 Shannon Conley, 41x29x5

The artist statement reads: This is part of a series made using USGS maps, this piece depicts the topography of the neighborhood where I grew up. Unfortunately, when my parents sold the house 25 years ago, the person that bought it never lived there and it has sat abandoned since then.

I'm really pleased with how it came out, the little wooden buttons separating the layers really worked out better than the last way I did the layers.  I really like the outcome of these quilts but they are tedious to make, so we'll see how long it is before I design another one.

New Quilt: 212 Canyon Road

 For a long time I've been wanting to make another topography quilt made based on the USGS topo maps.  The last one was in 2016, and featured the area encompassing a favorite hiking area in my childhood mountains.  

I decided this time to pick another area from my childhood, this time encompassing the neighborhood I grew up in.  Last time I used a synthetic non-woven (remay), but I'm in a using what I have era now, and I had a ton of this lightweight silk from Georgia (thanks Georgia!) so I decided to see if I could use that.  It's pretty thin, but so was the remay.  In this case I painted it and coated it with a layer of GAC400 fabric stiffener and that worked pretty well.

As usual, I painted with my small pots of latex paint.  I wanted a different color scheme than last time and I had a lot of these sandy pinks and blues, largely because both my sister and I have painted our house interiors recently and there were a lot of rejected shades that have now made their way into my stash.  I did a lot of color mixing to have a nice color transistion from the blue to the pinky-sand.  The painting took up the whole studio and made a big mess but I managed not to damage anything. 

Here's the final color range.  There's a different color for each elevation.  Like the prior piece, this one has three seections.  The size of the sections is limited by the cutting bed of my Brother Scan n Cut (12x24).  This time I'm doing a vertical orientation.  A lot of the colors have three layers apiece since that elevation occurs om each of the three sections.  Overall this one goes from 6280 to 7560 feet elevation, with each layer corresponding to 80 vertical fee.

I cut out all the layers with my new-to-me Brother scan n cut which I love.  I used my Silhouette for years but it finally just wore out and I'm very pleased with this new cutter.  I think it's a little like getting a new car-  even if you don't get a really fancy one, over the course of ten years or so the technology gets better.

When I did this kind of quilt before, I first tried using peltex to separate the layers but by the time all the layers piled up it was impossible to stitch through.  Then I tried using pony beads, and those worked but because they each had only one hole the whole stack sort of tipped over by the end.

This time I decided to precision cut button-like wooden discs to separate the layers.  The benefit of this was that they could have two holes that would perfectly line up and be flat (unlike actual random buttons) which would make the stack stand up better. It also meant I could pre-cut holes in the fabric (with the digital cutter) that were precisely spaced for the discs (you can see those in the picture above)  helping both with the sewing and the alignment.

I cut them on the laser cutter at the public library and at first had trouble getting the settings right (at first the cuts were too shallow and then they were too deep and my wood caught fire).  Luckily there wasn't any permanent damage and since then I've met with a librarian to learn a little more about the settings.

There you can see a pile of the little button discs cut out and ready to incorporate in the layers.

One other benefit of having all the buttons and holes in the fabric line up was that I could build the layers and sew them using thread, last time I had to use flower wire and that was a disaster. 

Come back later in the week to see the final piece!

  

Other recent crafty gifts

 Well I thought the last post pretty much covered all the recent crafty gifts, but I didn't realize how far behind I've been on blogging.  So today I'll share a few more.

First up is the most recent.  Just after the holidays one of the graduate students in my PhD program (named Beibei) told me she was having a baby!  I was so excited for her and pulled out this quilt top from my baby quilt stash and quilted it up for her.  The original blocks came from mom who made them at the very very very beginning of her quilting journey-- maybe sometime like 2010 ish?  According to my incomplete records they came into my stash in January 2023 and have now been turned into a fun baby quilt for a soon-to-arrive little baby boy.  

Originally not all the blocks had stuff on them, so I went ahead and added leaves to all the blocks.  I have no idea what my mom's original intention was, the block are really really random, but they're nice and blendy and should hid the baby barf pretty well.  I love using up things in the stash and the new mom-to-be was super happy with it.  Fingers crossed for a safe delivery!

Moving a little further back in time, while I was at my mom's at Thanksgiving, she was working on this adorable little pincushion she bought from a ceramicist as a kit. The kit came with the ceramic turtle and all the little doodads to embroider a little forest on top of him.  We both thought it was adorable and there were enough little bits left to start a couple of more.

We added in a bunch of craft supplies from my mom's random stash (her studio is a lot like my studio only it's been collecting cool stuff for 25 years longer).  I loved the little stamens and pom poms in her stash.  The biggest challenge was finding a couple more pottery bases, but since mom was a potter for decades, we found two others that were about the right size. 

Here are the three final ones,  on the left is the one we made for my sister nestled in a little heart shaped bowl my mom made.  The middle one is the one I made for me nestled in one of my mom's pottery man egg separators, and the one on the right is mom's.  I think they came out adorable!!! They're supposed to be pincushions, but right now, mine is just in my bedroom on my dresser where I can see it and smile.  

And here they are from the back :)

Finally,  last year I blogged about my dinosaur colorwork knitted sweater (which I've been wearing a ton lately).  Well I wound up with a TON of extra yarn from it and I decided to knit it up into a shawl.  I wanted something easy (idiot knitting) to work on while at conferences and the like so I picked the pattern called Theme and Variation from my Book of Haps.  It knit up pretty quickly and was a nice present for a friend of mine.  Blue was desperately trying to help with the blocking.  Alas.  Weirdly even after knitting a whole extra shawl, I still have yarn from the dino sweater project left so at some point it'll probably appear in a franken-project.

New art quilt: The Vanishing

 Last fall the Art Quilts exhibition at the Vision Gallery in Chandler AZ had a call for entry called Palette Cleanser that was looking for minimalist work.  I'd been thinking for a while about how to use  some of the white burnout silk velvet I got from Georgia (thanks Georgia!!)  The background was very see through but looks white when put on batting.  I decided to use it as the base for another in my series of smocked quilts.  I quilted it in sort of deserty colors mostly along the pattern of the fabric. 

For the smocking pattern I tried one I haven't done before that looks sort of like dragon scales.  It smocked up fairly easily.  I was pleased it got into the show and is now actually on its way home back to me.

The Vanishing, c. 2025 Shannon Conley, 41x30x3

I named it "The Vanishing" because it reminded me of the scales of the Pangolin, an adorable endangered animal that are highly illegally trafficked.  It makes me think of the mass extinction even currently happening due almost exclusively to human activity, destruction of natural habitat, trafficking, and climate change.