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."