Recent Bag Making

 I love bag making, but the plain truth is that I don't really need anymore bags.  But earlier this spring I was at an elementary school science event with a friend where we were helping kids make shrinky-dink cells (these two are photoreceptors and microglia), and it occurred to me that they would make good zipper pulls!  So with that measliest of justification, I decided I'd make little pouches for all my friends in 4 Common Corners for our upcoming retreat and make custom shrinky dink zipper pulls for each one with our logo and everyone's name.

They're just simple lined pouches, good for random supplies or notions, and they're all different sizes.  My other goal was to use up all the cute sample blocks or test things I had lying around in the studio to make something fun and useable!

Microglia!

Photoreceptor!

I loved this turquoise codouroy.  It was fun to pick out corresponding scraps of bright colors for the insides.

These were leftover sample prints from two different printmaking exercises,  the one in the back was a block print carved in meat-packing foam, and the front one was a silk screen made from fusible vinyl.  Both from many years ago, I'm so glad to have used them for something fun!

These three are made from quilt blocks where I was trying trapunto and bobbin quilting with the Ricky Tims Razzle Dazzle.  I never knew what to do with them, so fun pouches it is!

This one is another more recent printmaking sample.  I have no idea where that blotchy yellow sample came from, but I printed a star from the carved block I used for the Kyrie Eleison quilt recently.  The star is cut in half directly along the zipper, so the other half of the star is on the other side.

For a very brief time I had (? or borrowed?) a needle felting machine and I remember making this big piece of needle felted fabric covered with bright pink, gold, and brown silks and other weird fabrics.  I was just trying to see what would felt and what wouldn't and it made the most random (but colorful) and textural piece of fabric.  Once again, thrilled to use it for something!!

And here they are all together!  It satisfied my bag making itch and used up some of the bits and bobs that have been in the studio for years.

In an unrelated spate of bagmaking, my sister and I also recently made these three project tote bags while at my mom's for my Grandma's 98th birthday.  Becky wanted a new project bag, and I can never turn down the opportunity to make bags, so I joined in.  

We decided to use some of my mom's early test quilts/samples for the project and wound up making one for each of us.  The quilts were mostly things my mom made in early workshops or technique tests rather than "good" art quilts, but she had sentimental attachments to them and didn't want to throw them away, so bag making was a fun way to transform them.  We wound up with enough bound edge to make the handles, and enough body of the quilts to make one external side and the large external pocket.  

I think they turned out way more fun than if we'd just used stash fabric.  The quilted outer layer adds some body and a bunch of fun color and pattern to them.

I thought it was such a fun thing to do with the old quilts I've set aside some of mine for when the bag making bug hits again.  

Unfortunately, we managed to bend the shaft of my mom's main sewing machine while sewing over a bunch of quilted layers which permanently ruined it.  I felt really terrible, but mom was super sweet about it. Becky and I offered to help chip in for a new one, but right now she's sewing on one of my dad's rescued singers, and seems to like that ok.  It was a sad end to a fun project though.

Here's hoping you have some fun bag-making (without sewing machine damage) in your future!

Small SAQA Donation Quilts

 Earlier this year I made a couple of very small quilts for a couple of SAQA calls.  One was for the annual spotlight auction, a SAQA fundraiser associated with the annual conference.  I have a wonderful collection of spotlight auction quilts hanging in my office at work and I look forward to picking up a couple more every year.

This year I was experimenting more the the three-dimensional string idea I'd played around with in some wood and string sculptures a few years ago.  I love string art, and I for some reason have one million small grommets, so this seemed like a good opportunity to experiment with them together.  I have no idea where all the grommets came from, but I had a hard time getting them set evenly and I had a hard time getting them to go all the way through the quilt sandwich.  So I finished and donated the piece, but I have to figure out some other way to use up all the other million grommets.

Spring Fling, c. Shannon Conley 2026, 6"x8"


Much more fun was this piece I made for the SAQA New Mexico Trunk show call.  I didn't want to do a 3D thing because that makes it hard on the organizers/shippers who have to get the trunk show from one place to the next, so I decided to do another one of my "initial" quilts.  Since it was for the New Mexico show I decided on a NM-themed design.  It's also quite small, something like 7x10.

O Fair New Mexico, c. 2026, Shannon Conley, 7x10

Here it was during quilting,  you can sort of see the water soluble stabilizer that is over the open areas.  I use that during quilting and then soak it to leave open areas. You can see it a little better in the bigger view below.  I've used a couple of different kinds of the water soluble stabilizer,  this kind is very clear and dissolves a way pretty quickly.  It's a little plasticky and slightly flimsier to sew through, but you can see what's underneath it.  I've also used a kind that's white, looks more like a regular lightweight interfacing.  I find it easier to sew/pin/work with (the hand is more fabric like) but it doesn't dissolve quite as quickly.  Both work fine and this is what's in my stash at the moment!

A yucca is always an easy default for NM-themed things.  They're so beautiful.  We actually recently came back from a trip to Sequoia/Kings Canyon National Parks and saw the chaparral yuccas in bloom there.  They were enormous and gorgeous. 8-10 feet tall and just huge huge blooms. 

And I love my little roadrunner!  We saw a couple roadrunners at big bend down in Texas earlier this year which was super fun.  This one is mostly made out of necktie scraps leftover from the test tube/bee eye project.  

I really have fun making things, they scratch my itch for illuminated letters and symbolism while still being small. I hope folks that see the trunk show enjoy looking at it!

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.