SAQA Donation Quilt: Cuttlefish

I'm taking a break from my big ongoing project for long enough to try out a new idea.  If it works, I'll send it in as a donation to the SAQA auction for this year.

I've been thinking about the idea of cutwork embroidery and negative space, and how that could be used in quilting in a very free-form way.  To try it out, I made a quilt sandwich in which all three layers were synthetic (i.e. backing and front polyester and polyester batting), then traced a cuttlefish from a picture I took at the Monterey aquarium a few years back.  I free motion stitched the fish outline with cotton thread, then used my woodburning tool to cut through all three layers just inside the outline.  

It worked great, the woodburning tool cut right up to the edge of the cotton thread (which doesn't burn as easily) and sealed all three layers so there were no frayed edges or loose batting.  As usual, it was pretty fumey so I did it in front of a fan by an open window.

Here it is with the fish cut out.

After cutting out the fish, I put two layers of water soluble stabilizer under the open areas and just started thread painting.  This is as far as I've gotten- I'm trying to get enough thread on there that all the edges will be connected (and nothing will be floppy) but still leave a fair amount of open space (since that was the original idea).  I have no idea what's going to happen when I put it in water to remove the stabilizer, but keep your fingers crossed!

It's been really fun to work on something light-hearted, low stress, and relatively unimportant.  I'm linking up with Nina-Marie!

Show Announcement: Beyond Tradition

Hi all, I just wanted to pop in to say that I have several pieces in a SAQA New Mexico regional show called Beyond Tradition.  It's being held at the Hubbard Museum of the American West in Ruidoso Downs, NM and runs from April 5-September 1.  If any of you are traveling through southern New Mexico, you might check it out!

I'm privileged to have three pieces hanging in Beyond Tradition: Winter in Lincoln County 2: Sierra Blanca, Winter in Lincoln County 1: The Orchard, and Ring Around the Mole.

Concurrently hanging at the museum are A Walk in the Wild and A Color Runs Through It, so you can also see Seymour the Coelophysis, Taming the Gorgons, and Black and White and Read All Over.

Many thanks to Betty Busby who has worked really hard to make this happen, and also to everyone else who helped including my super Mom who has been the local contact for it.  

Minky Blankets

I know more  minky blankets are not particularly exciting, but in the interest of documenting my projects I thought I'd do a quickie post about some I made last year and never got around to sharing.  One for a brand new baby (I adore that bug print from one of Jane Sassaman's old lines), and one for a terminally ill friend who has since passed away.

Weekender Bag for Mom

Ever since my mom saw my Amy Butler weekender bag, she's wanted one as well.  So for Christmas (which for this bag came in early February) I made her one.  I followed most of the same tips that I did the last time, you can see them summarized here.  The only thing I didn't do was make a shoulder strap- surprisingly I don't use mine all that much (the weight of the bag distributes weirdly on a single shoulder strap).  On this one I just lengthened the handles so they're long enough to carry the bag over the shoulder.  I think it turned out even better than mine, and I think my mom likes it!  

One of the coolest thing about this version is that I turned the zippers around.  I had to get a parka zipper which has the zips in a tail-to-tail orientation, rather than a suitcase zipper which has the zips in a head to head orientation.  I saw some things on line that indicated you could turn them around (provided it was s non-separating zipper), but I couldn't really find any instructions.  I thought I'd be brave, so I just cut both ends off the zipper, pulled the zips off, and put them back on the other way around.   I have no idea whether that's the right way, but it totally worked, and now the zipper opens from the middle like a real suitcase!

Possibly the most exciting thing about this project is that I didn't sew over any fingers during its construction (yay)!

WIP Wednesday

Hello blogland!  I've been busy working (in the lab) and designing my Eucharistic Prayer C Quilt.  I can't show it, even in progress, but at this point, it's not even recognizable as anything, so I thought I'd go ahead and share.

It's taken a ton of design work to get to this point, but I'm now ready to screen print my first text.  Here's my background fabric all marked (the blue lines are registration lines to align my screens).  This is just the left panel, there's a right panel I haven't marked yet that's the same size.

isn't that the most boring in progress picture you've ever seen?

And these are all my silk screens.  They're made out of fusible vinyl (the black marker is scribbled on the vinyl before cutting so you can see it since it's clear) and then fused to organza.  I kept all the letters I peeled out of the screens- I'm bound and determined to do something with them but I'm not sure what yet.

I also painted this chiffon planet, but I'm really not sold on it- we'll see later whether I decide to use it, and then there are a few initials I sketched out that will be incorporated later as well.

I'm hoping to start printing tomorrow or Friday so wish me luck!

Linking up with Lee and Nina-Marie as always!

Small Christmas Lights Quilts

Studio Art Quilts Associates is doing a 25th Anniversary Trunk Show and SAQA members were invited to make small (7" x 10") pieces for it.  I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to try something that had been in the back of my mind for a little while.

One of my favorite Christmas traditions is going around to see all the Christmas lights, and back in December I took this picture while we were walking around the Chesapeake campus.  In one of my upcoming big quilts I'm trying to figure out how best to depict a galaxy, and I thought I'd use this opportunity to try out some possible techniques using a related subject matter.

There were three aspects of this that I was interested in conveying.  The first was the diffuse color arising from the lights that more or less outlined the tree.  The second was the bright punctate lights themselves, and the third was the leaves on the trees, which blend almost into the background since they're not illuminated.

I decided to make two different versions on two different types of fabric, one on some black polyester with a wannabe dupioni silk finish, and one on black velvet.  To start I outlined my trees, made some vector shapes, and cut them out of adhesive foil using my silhouette. I wanted to use adhesive vinyl but the foil came with the silhouette machine and vinyl didn't, but the foil worked fine.  I used both pieces of the cutout.  First, I stuck the outline to my fabric and used it as a stencil to fill in the tree shape with my Shiva paintsticks, then I peeled that off and stuck down the tree part.  I rubbed the paintsticks on the foil of the tree and then smudged it off onto the fabric.  You can kind of see the smeary edges around the tree outlines that I achieved doing this. The velvet was kind of a pain to use the paintsticks on- I think the nap of the fabric was not my friend.

Velvet

Polyester

To make the punctate lights I wanted to try foiling, so I made a screen, again cut on the silhouette from the adhesive foil.  I put it on chiffon and then tried to screen glue through it for foiling.  I didn't have foiling glue, so used regular creamy white fabric glue.  This was a bit less successful than the first step.  In the first place, although the silhouette cut out all those tiny little dots, they didn't peel out automatically and I didn't have the patience to peel them all out by hand.  To give you an idea of how many there were, my silhouette took an hour to cut this.  The places where I did get the pieces out the glue went through ok, but it dried in the holes really fast so I didn't get very much through on the second one.

When it came to ironing the foil, it didn't work very well on the velvet.  The foil didn't really want to come off on the glue, and the glue wanted to come off of the fabric (again, I think the nap of the velvet was bad for this).  It was even worse when I got to the quilting, the little globs of foil/glue were really popping off. You can see below how much less sparkly foil there is after I quilted it.

velvet one after foiling before quilting

Velvet one after quilting

Shannon Conley, Lights at Chesapeake, 2014, 7x10

This is the polyester one, it turned out better, the foil was much less inclined to pop off since the glue was stuck down so much better.  I did wind up dabbing the glue on mostly by hand (this was the second one I tried to screen with the glue so the screen was pretty clogged) and you can see some places where the glue was kind of globby so there's a big clump of foil.  On each of them, I put the leaves in during the quilting, and I think that part at least was successful.

Neither of them came out quite as good as I was hoping, but I went ahead and sent the right one (the one on the polyester) to the SAQA exhibit.  I hope it captures the feeling I was going for.  The jury is still out on how I'm going to do the galaxy though since this paintsticks-plus-foiling didn't work quite as well as I'd hoped.

Have you guys ever tried to portray lights, like Christmas lights or stars, before in your work?  How'd you do it?  What worked and what didn't?

I'm linking up with Nina-Marie's as ever.

Old Throw And New Throw

Over the weekend when Mike was cleaning out the garage and organizing his tools (incidentally, have any of you ever noticed how allan wrenches multiply),  I came across this giant quilt that my mom and sister and I made.  It was certainly one of our very first quilting projects-based on the T-shirts in it, my guess is that we made it in 1997 or so. The back is denim- all old recycled jeans we cut up into 6" squares and pieced. You can see it's tied, not quilted which is probably good as it's so heavy.  Of course this was long before we really knew anything about quilting so there's no interfacing or anything on the t-shirts, but it makes a superb picnic blanket (it's really too heavy to sleep under).  I'm so glad to have found it- I actually thought it had been lost.

And here's a new throw I just finished last weekend.  It's smaller, about 62" square, but I really wanted to make myself a cuddly throw.  It's backed with yellow minky, and uses some favorite prints that have been in my stash for a while.  I love that purply color (it's Kona Berry), and I just cut and appliqued pieces on until I liked it.  Kind of fun that the main shape is sort of kite like and we had to take pictures on such a windy day.  I quilted it (in contrast to the baby sized minky blankets I've made), and bound it with soft satiny blanket binding.

It's gotten cold here again, so this is the perfect thing to cuddle up under by the fire.

More Gifts

I promise this will be the last Christmas post-

I just wanted to share a few more things I made as Christmas presents this year.   Mostly there were ornaments-  I send ornaments to a few friends every year and also have the tradition of making a yearly ornament for Mike and Anna and Alex.  Alas,  I neglected to take pictures of the Anna and Alex ornaments and the ones I made for my friends....

Anyhow, I made this ornament for my mom- I was just playing around with different fonts for my embroidery machine.  It didn't really like the "r" on that gold font, live and learn!  It says "Keep your friends close and your seam ripper closer."  The quote was from pinterest of course.

Here's the one I made for Mike this year, it features the logo of the Iron Butt Association.  He's big into long distance motorcycle riding.

And here's the only non-ornament handmade Christmas present for the year-  a doll afghan for Anna to match the afghan I made Alex when he was born.  It was just from scrap yarn (you can see the bright red didn't even make it around once), but Anna seemed to like it and started carrying it around and wrapping her dolly in it right away.  

Second Finish of 2014-Do You See What I See

Some of you may know this already, but in my non-art life I'm a photoreceptor cell biologist.  I've always said I don't really make science-y quilts, (in contrast to my mom), but in looking at my previous work, I find that's not necessarily the case.  Both Seymour the dinosaur and Ring Around the Mole were very much science-y in their development and outlook, even though I'm in no way an ecologist or paleontologist.  Here, however, I've veered into without-a-doubt-linked-to-my-scientific-work territory with a quilt featuring photoreceptors.

The quilt was based on an electron micrograph taken by my quilty crafty friend Barb, who is a fabulous microscopist.  Photoreceptors are the cells in the very back of your retina which are actually responsible for sensing light and converting it into the chemical/electrical signals that are eventually processed by the brain and register as vision.  They have quite different ultrastructure from other cells, characterized most obviously by a giant long extension from the cell body.  This is called an outer segment and is filled with stacked membranous discs (like a stack of flattened whoopie cushions or something).  These discs are packed with all the proteins necessary for sensing light.  All the photoreceptors in this picture (which came from a mouse retina) are rod photoreceptors which mediate peripheral and low light vision.

Photoreceptors really are the first step in determining how we see the world, thus the name for the quilt, "Do You See What I See" (for me the answer is almost always bright rainbows of color...)

Do You See What I See, c. Shannon Conley, 2014, 24"x37"

In this second picture I've labeled what these structures are, OS: outer segments, IS: inner segments, CC: connecting cilium.  Protein is synthesized in the inner segment and then is transported through the connecting cilium to the outer segment (by processes which remain highly contentious, in case anyone was wondering what photoreceptor people argue about).  

The quilt is pieced using Caryl Fallert's Appli-piecing method, and the photoreceptor discs were bobbin quilted using some fabulous rainbow wool yarn I got in Germany a couple summers ago. I had monofilament in the top, so in some cases you can see that my discs overlap in a most unscientific fashion, since it was kind of tricky to see where I'd already sewn! All of the organelles/trafficking vesicles/basal bodies/microtubules in the inner segment and connecting cilium are hand done.  There's embroidery with wool crewel yarn and with the rainbow yarn, as well as a fair amount of beading.  I feel like handwork is still one of my weakest skills, but I enjoy it, and it was fun to have something on which to practice.  The blue background was free motion quilted.

Do You See What I See, c. Shannon Conley, 2014, detail

Do You See What I See, c. Shannon Conley, 2014, detail

Do You See What I See, c. Shannon Conley, 2014, detail

Do You See What I See, c. Shannon Conley, 2014, detail

Do You See What I See, c. Shannon Conley, 2014, detail

Do You See What I See, c. Shannon Conley, 2014, detail

Do You See What I See, c. Shannon Conley, 2014, detail

This quilt feels very "me", and I hope you enjoy seeing it.  Many thanks to Barb,  I can tell you the skills required to capture images like hers are very very rare.

I'm linking up with link-a-finish-Friday, TGIFF, and as always, Nina-Marie's.

Planning for the New Year

Here's a gratuitous dog picture of Missy queening it up on my giant pouf to start a wordy post.

I've never had a word of the year before, but I've decided that this year I should pick one, and that it should be calm.  I tend to be constantly running around like a chicken with its head cut off, and while I am busy and do try to do a lot of things, I can't imagine that I'm really truly busier than anybody else.  More importantly, I think my frantic approach is pretty unhealthy.  So this year, to use the 90s vernacular, I'm going to try to chill out, calm down, and relax.  My goal isn't necessarily to accomplish less or more, but just to be a little less "AHHHH".

When I look back at my goal post from this time last year, I feel like I accomplished most of the things I set out to do, including my two main goals which were 1. to finish my last big UFO (the dogs), and 2. to make four new art quilts in 2013 (you can actually see all my 2013 quilt finishes here).   Ring around the mole (the mammal mandala) feels like my biggest piece of 2013, but technically it's a 2014 finish.

For 2014, I have a lot of things I've either started,  have in my brain, or just want to work on.  I'm not sure I'll actually do them all, but here's a place to start.

Art Quilts-I have three new art quilts in my brain just bursting to get out, so far I'm calling them
Benedicta Quilt
Eucharistic Prayer C Quilt, and
Christmas Light Quilt
I also have to come up with some basic ideas for the Jane Sassaman class we're taking in April.

Quickie Quilts
I need to make a baby quilt for my friends Heather and Mark and
I want to make a pieced, minky backed lap quilt/throw for me.

Clothes and Accessories
I have a crochet shrug pattern I'm anxious to start, and
two sets of fabric for tops to make.
I've also ordered fabric for some rainbow leggings (yay), and I'm currently working on a
Weekender bag for my Mom (which was supposed to be a Christmas present but which I just started)

UFOs- I'm bound and determined to finish at least some of these languishing projects this year.
EPP Star Mini
Crocheted Afghan
Armadillo whole cloth quilt thing
Christmas tree doily

General Things to Learn/think about
Work on Embroidery Software
Think about/test different edge finishes
Think about/test different methods of including shadows
Think about a pulley system in the studio for large quilts


And just because pictures are so much more fun than long wordy posts, here's another gratuitous dog picture.

This is Swatch and Shooter (a mother daughter pair).  Shooter always seems to chew on ears.  That's poor skunk dog in the background- he's my mom's precious very very old dog (16-17 I think), and has to wear diapers and takes lots of naps, but otherwise seems quite content to still follow my mom around happily.