New Quilt: Origami 2

 Last week I shared the process and inspiration for some origami quilts I made early last year.  Click on over to read about the process.

Today I want to share about the other piece I worked on at the same time as that one.  I made these the same way as the other piece, first painting and quilting, and then folding the origami stars.  These two pieces of fabric were a bit smaller than the first one so the stars were small enough that I didn't want to have them as two separate pieces.  I decided to mount them to the light box together and I like the way the star shapes are similar but not exactly the same.  As with the others, they can exhibit with or without power and have a lovely effect either way. 

Building the light box

Origami 2, 2024, Shannon Conley

New Quilts: Origami 1

 I'm still so far behind on blogging, but I am committed to catching up.  Today I'm sharing some pieces I finished last spring for our most recent past show at the New Mexico State Capitol.

I've always loved origami and in in December of 2023 I signed up to learn how to do origami tesselations with Madonna Yoder at Gathering Folds.  If you have any interest in origami tesselations I strongly recommend her site.  

I decided to see if I could make some origami tesselation quilts.  The hardest part of any origami with fabric is the difficulty with holding crisp folds but I wanted to give it a try! I started with some very lightweight semi-sheer swiss dot fabric and painted it with a light wash of paint.  I quilted two layers together, but did not include batting since I knew the batting would make it even harder for the pieces to hold folds during the origami process. 

I marked the fold patterns with washable marker and began folding.

My tiny binder clips were essential during the folding process.  After I was done with folding, I stitched down all the folds with hand stitching, but during the folding process I couldn't have done it without the binder clips.  The folding process was definitely challenging,  when you do these with paper you make a ton of pre-creases for the fold lines which really helps with the folding.  I ironed in the precreases but every time I ironed one crossing over a different one, it flattened the first one!!

This is my first finished quilted star, and I love how different it looks from the front vs. the back.

One of my favorite things about these folded stars is how you get a very different effect when light shines through.  That's why I selected a semi-sheer fabric to begin with, but the piece has to be back lit to see this.

I decided to mount the piece to a fabric covered light box so it could be displayed with our without back lighting.  Unfortunately I couldn't find any light boxes to buy, so I made them.  It turned out to be kind of a fun project!  A little bit like building cool things as a kid with my electricity set (thanks dad!).

Here is the final piece with and without the back lighting (and after getting rid of all the dreadful marking lines).  I think it came out really fun and I enjoy having them hang in my office now that the show is done.  I really love the effect of the quilting stitches and how you see them as part of the design when it's backlit.

Origami 1, Shannon Conley, c. 2024, 26 x 26 x 2

I actually worked on two of these pieces in parallel, come back next week to see the other one!

New Quilt-Summer in Lincoln County 2024

This was a 2024 quilt that I never got around to blogging about, so I thought I'd share it here as we get going into 2025.  I was doing some small smocking quilts in preparation for filming an episode of Quilting Arts TV and decided to use this vibrant red-orange velvet as my base fabric.  Normally I paint my quilt tops when they'll be smocked or whole cloth, but at first I thought I'd just use the solid red.  Unfortunately, after quilting it, it just looked really flat, so I decided to see what would happen if I painted it.  Usually when I pait my fabrics, I start with something fairly light colored, so I wasn't sure what would happen when I tried to paint the strong dense red. 

Here's how the piece looked after painting, and the second picture is the back.  I was very intrigued by the colors I got using green and yellow paint (the backing fabric was white so the colors you see in the second picture are from paint that came through the quilt.  Very interesting.  And definitely hard to get color on top of the very bright red velvet.

But I really liked the red with the dark blackish looking accents- it felt like smoke coming off a fire.  And 2024 was definitely a summer of fires for my family, both as individuals and in my parents' community. I decided I'd make a smocked quilt using this fabric and enter it into the Primal Forces: Fire exhibition.

Above you can see the pattern marked for the smocking, and below you can see what the back looks like as the smocking is in progress.

Here's the finished quilt.  The strong red was really hard to photograph, everything was just so saturated with that eye searing red, but I think you can get the idea.

Lincoln County, Summer 2024, c. Shannon Conley, 2024, 37" x 25" x 2"

The artist statement reads: "The 2024 fire season in Lincoln County, New Mexico, was devastating, burning great chunks of Ruidoso, the town I grew up in.  As the climate in the American southwest continues to get drier, the fire seasons get longer and more severe."

It didn't get into Primal Forces: Fire, but I expect at some point I'll send it to something else.