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.