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.

Welcome to 2026: Crafty goodness from Christmas

 Well once again it's been several months since my last blog update and I have a bunch of art quilts from the last third of 2025 to share (so so behind), but I thought I'd do a quick recap of some Christmas crafts first and share some goals for 2026.

I'm not sure there's much point in doing a 2025 wrap-up for art quilts since so many of the quilts I have to blog about in the next month or so are actually 2025 finishes.  But as I think about 2026 goals, there are a few crafty things on my radar. It feels weird to focus on these small creative pleasures when so many awful things are happening to our democracy, but here I am anyway.  

First, I want to finish my liturgical series.  I'm not sure it will ever be truly finished, it's something that feels like I'll want to keep adding to it, but there are two key quilts to finish so that it is ready to exhibit and I want to start exhibiting it towards the end of this year.

Second, I'd like to come back to a bunch of things that I have pieces for but aren't fully conceptualized.  This includes another pom pom quilt (for which the pom poms are already made), another test tube piece, something that uses a collection of recycled plastic water bottles I've been saving, something that uses the grandmother's flower garden blocks made by my great-grandmotehr, something with the silk cocoons I bought somewhere last year, and something incorporating the metal braid I learned to make at a workshop.  So many different random resources, but no clear direction.

Third, I'd like to think more clearly about what kind of work I get excited about making.  It always seems like I'm pushing from one show entry to the next, and of course I enjoy all the things I'm working on, but sometimes I wonder if I need to pause and step back and really think about my artistic direction.

Well, enough navel gazing for now,  here are some of the crafty Christmas goodies from 2025.

I've always loved the straight line drawings that make curved and circular shapes, and I decided to use that idea to make my ornaments this year. It was so much fun to pick out different threads and patterns.

I also made a special ornament for my brother-in-law who plays Warhammer 40K.  He loves building and painting the miniatures, so I made this ornament based on one of his Warhammer people. 

I didn't really make very many gifts this year, but I did finish this pair of chartreuse socks for my friend Anna, and the hat just below for my friend Carolyn (who adopted a white kitty this year).  I have some things on the needles now, knitting really is a nice thing to fill in the holes around the art quilts.

I loved all the different cats dancing around the hat.  Both of these were sort of cobbled together from multiple patterns in my pattern library.

Finally, here's a crafty finish that's been multiple years in the making.  My good friend Kristin sent me a set of tiles from Santa Theresa Tileworks in Tucson and then about a year ago I put them together into this mosaic with some house numbers I picked up in Tubac AZ, and some other mosaic-ing tile.  Unfortunately after applying the tiles, it set for over a year in my garage.  Finally just after Christmas this year I pulled it out, grouted it, and made it a frame from some door molding I saved after a dog ate the rest.  It's pretty heavy and I'm not sure I'll be able to hang it on my house (the siding and brick are both hard to drill into) but I think it's pretty and it's sitting on a shelf in the house for now.  And I'm super glad it's finished.  

We also had the very bad storm this past weekend, with ice, snow, and very cold temperatures.  On saturday morning while staying inside I made myself these new placemats.  The fabric, cam from my dear friend Georgia, and I fell in love with it.  I consider it the very best of grandma upholstery fabric and I thought the placemats would go great with my pink dining room chairs and blue pottery (they do).  The flowers remind me of spring!

Dinosaur Colorwork Sweater-Part 2

 Earlier in the week I shared the first bits of my dinosaur colorwork sweater.  This is the most ambitious knitting project I've ever done.  The only other one that comes close was my cabled lace COVID shawl.  But I do feel like I've gotten better at stranded colorwork over the course of the sweater!

Blue and Spooky like to "help" with the knitting when I sit down on the couch.  Sadly their help pretty much prevents any knitting progress, so I either have to put away the kintting and snuggle the pups or go find a different chair.

By the time I was finished with the stegosauruses and triceratops I showed earlier in the week, the sweater was almot but not quite the right length.  But I was 100% in love with the T-rex skulls (another three color pattern) and possibly my favorite of the bunch was the meteors flying to the earth with the volcanos.  Sorry dinosaurs.

I was feeling pretty done with colorwork by the time I got to the sleeves, so they are mostly plain/striped but I did feel like I wanted to include one row of these little dinos hatching out of green eggs.  Unfortunately, the sleeve part of the pattern is the only part I really don't like the fit of.  It was way too big around and didn't decrease enough for my taste.  I tried boiling just the sleeves to make them shrink and it might have helped a little but not that much.

Here it is after I finied the knitting with the stitches picked up for the steek, and the bottom pic after actually doing the steek.  Pretty scary but it worked fine.  I enclosed the two sides of the steek by knittin a garder edge on the front and back side and enclosing the steek edges inside (third picture).  That matched up aesthetically with what I did on the collar and bottom/cuff edges and made a nice finish inside too.

Here it is all blocked out.  I love it so much except the dumb wide sleeves.

And here I am wearing it.  You can tell it's quite long, but I really wanted to get my patterns in.  And it really does fit nice across the bust and shoulders.  It has one button at the top with a crocheted loop closure to help it stay up. 

There are a few pretty loose floats inside but all in all for a first big colorwork project I think it turned out good!  I love the rainbow and blue and dark purple, but it really isn't the best to see all the intricate colorwork.  I think there's a reason fair isle sweaters tend to be super high contrast.  Oh well!  Future projects! Even in fingering weight yarn it's quite dense and warm so after having a friend take this pictures, it got folded away until the weather cools off considerably.

Dinosaur Colorwork Sweater-Part 1

 

At last year's 4 Common Corners retreat (October 2024) several of us who are also knitters decided to do a sweater knit along.  We used the great book "The Knitters Handy Guide to Top Down Sweaters" and most of us used the wonderful doodle design packs from Pacific Knit Co..  I of course got the dinosaur patterns, because, duh.  Anyway, I decided to do a cardigan since that's more wearable where I live (where it is seldom cold enough to wear a pullover sweater all day, and I decided to use stash yarn.  The yarn below is what I pulled from my stash.  The two skeins of hand-dyed rainbow are some I bought at the Houston quilt show a few years ago.  It came with a shawl pattern I liked but never made.  The three dark blue tweedy balls I bought at the SAQA conference in Toronto while on a knitting excursion with my friend Helena, only to arrive home and find those other balls of tweedy blue in the stash of yarn I inherited from Trish.  I thought that might be enough, and in the end it was so much more than enough that I'm currently knitting a shawl with what's leftover from the sweater.

Because it was going to be stranded colorwork (pretty new to me) and because none of the sweater's I've ever knit before fit properly, I decided to swatch.  I think it was a good choice, since the sweater actually fits reasonably well.  In the picture below, I've knit a rainbow dinosaur into the blue background (the dinosaur's head is orange and his body and legs are mostly rainbow).  

The swatch came out fine, but very blendy, which isn't great for colorwork but I steamed ahead anyway.

This was some little dino footprints I knitted along the collar.

And in the tops section I had dinosaur footprints, small stegasaurus, and dinosaur bones in rainbow on a blue background.  Then I was worried it was hard to see, so I switched to small brontosaurses and large brontasauruses in blue on a rainbow background.

I did a round of triceratops in blue on the dark purple background, and didn't want to carry three different threads, so I tried out doing some duplicate stitch for the horn in pink (next pic) and dark green (following pic), but I didn't really like either, so I picked it out and decided to just go with the plain blue on dark blue (bottom pic).  I think it looks ok.  Again blendy, but my duplicate stitch wasn't sitting right or helping.

And of course here you can see that when I did the big stegasauruses (purple and blue and green), I did manage to figure out how to hold three yarns.  It was a giant mess, but I did it.

Here's a weird bathroom selfie mid knit-  I think it fit pretty well!   Come back later in the week to see the finished sweater.