Crafty Christmas Gifts-the textile ones!

I didn't make quite as many gifts as I have some years, but I did make a few.

To start I knit this pair of bright yellow socks for my mom.  They used up leftover yarn from two other projects, this crocheted shawl and it's matching pair of socks.  I think now almost all the yarn from that project is gone!  It was my first time doing a regular heel, and I think they came out cute.  I hope my mom enjoys them!

I also crocheted a bunch of dishcloths and a potholder for my mom, sister, and santa ministry presents.  It was fun to go back to crocheting after mostly doing knitting for the last year.  It is a bit hard on my elbow, though it seems to depend on my posture.

I used some scrap leather to make a couple of keychains, one for Mike and one for our family silly santa game.  My mom wound up with that one and she was weirdly excited about the keychain.

And then I stitched up a quick gift bag for some socks out of some remnants of handwoven fabric the famous Georgia mad (hi Georgia!!).  It was almost the right size for a glasses case and my mom got new clip on glasses for Christmas, so I went ahead and took apart the gift back and made it into a nice lined two-pocket (she has two pairs of clip on glasses) glasses case!  I love using up these remnants,  I have a bunch and the weaving is so soft and beautiful.

I also made wooden ornaments and a wooden nativity as presents this year, check back on Monday to see those!

I Like #146

Welcome to another week of things to like!

1.  I'm sorry but I have to start out with one last video from the holidays, this one of Blue playing with his toy.  We don't really have dog toys at our house because Bullett used to hoard them (though we do play ball).  However, my mom's dog Jordy got a toy as a present from his groomer and he doesn't play with toys so we gave it to Blue.  He was so excited,  he didn't even need someone to play with him, just ran around and tossed the toy for himself!  Of course he did want you to be standing out in the cold with him....  Bentley liked it too, but mostly just tried to rip it up.

2.  I finally (!) got around to blogging about one of my main quilts from 2019.  I thought I'd done it already but evidently not.  It's a part of my liturgical series featuring the Lord's prayer.  There are two posts, one in progress post and one with the final quilt.  Check it out if you didn't see it already.

3.  I went to Dallas this weekend to see my sister, it was really great actually, I said goodbye to her family at my mom's and then two days later said hello at her house!  I wouldn't normally go down so soon after visiting, but I had to take them their new pet rats.  The rats were a Christmas present from their parents, but we decided to adopt some research rats from my university.  They were so calm and snuggly, they really do make great pets.  Both kids were super super excited and did really well with them.  I'm so happy they have them!  The kids named them Silky and Puffy.  Becky made them all sorts of things for their cage, including a two-storied hammock!  Apparently they both crawl in it.  You can see one of them in it in the last picture.

4. I got home from Christmas to a lovely pile of Christmas cards and a very exciting parcel. I love getting cards from my grandma; in addition to the card itself, there are always a variety of miscellaneous stamps.  Some may remember my previously mentioning that she collected stamps for many years for her grandkids (including me) and there were usually lots of leftovers after pulling out the plate block.  This card has one from 1965 celebrating the battle of New Orleans (War of 1812!) and one from 1959 commemorating the St. Lawrence Seaway.  But my favorites are those 4 beautiful Forest Conservation stamps from 1958, really cool.  Love you Grandma!

5.  A new book!  I don't often recommend books, I'm not sure why, but this week I finished two set in the same world.  I really enjoyed both, but the first in particular.  It's called "The Rook" and is a sort of urban fantasy about a girl who is high up in the supernatural equivalent of the CIA and who wakes up one day with no memories.  I thought it had great worldbuilding and characters without sacrificing a good interesting plot.  Definitely recommend if you like fantasy at all.  The other book was its follow-up and is called Stiletto.  That was good too, and I especially liked that they were the same characters but separate plots.  I really hate books where there is no satisfactory conclusion between books.  So aggravating.

Lord's Prayer Finished

Welcome back to the final post on my Lord's Prayer quilt!  You can find the first post about making it here.  

I love this quilt so much, mostly because working on it was so full of memories of Linda and her music.  I love the rich colors, although it's a bit darker than I thought, and very hard to take pictures of.  I'm pleased with the quilting too, especially in the interlocking borders and the little doohickeys surrounding the text.  It has lots of fun fabrics: metallics, velvets, microsuedes, and all sort of other things.

However, I don't think I really captured the joy and groundswell of emotion I feel when singing the music.  I think that's partly because the colors wound up so dark.  I also think it has to do with the number of words.  One thing that's been a challenge in this liturgical series is how many words I have to include.  In many cases, I've used only snippets of prayers or bible verses, but here I really wanted to use the whole prayer (and music).  I think to really capture the joy I feel singing Linda's music, I need to do a more abstract quilt inspired by my feelings while singing, rather than something incorporating the text itself.    Another one of the anthems Linda composed has the love text from Corinthians, and I think that will be something I use for a more abstract musical inspired piece in future.   Unfortunately, I probably won't get to it for a while, there are two other liturgical quilts that will have to come before that as well as a bunch of pieces for shows I'm already committed to this year.  Oh well!  Always more ideas than time!  

Enjoy the pictures of this piece though,  I really do smile every time I see it!

Our Father, c. 2019 Shannon Conley, 73" x 53", photo by Mike Cox.

New Quilt: Lord's Prayer (Last of 2019)

In putting together my year-in-review post, I realized I'd never blogged about one of my biggest (both in terms of size and time) quilts of 2019.  I could have sworn I'd written the posts, but when I went back they were only in draft form with pictures but no writing.  It really is a 2019 quilt so I guess I need to get to it!

The quilt is part of my liturgical series and features the text of the Lord's Prayer set to music composed by my dear friend Linda Kelly.  For years and years, every Sunday we sang it to her music and it filled me with so much joy.  Here is a very old crummy recording, hopefully in spite of the bad recording quality you can her the glory in her music.  I recorded that at Linda's twentieth anniversary celebration at church, and singing it every Sunday is one of the things I miss dearly now that she is not longer our choir director and organist.  

I knew I wanted the Lord's prayer piece of my series to feature her music, so I started looking at images of medieval illuminated hymnbooks.  The musical notation during the medieval period was quite different to modern musical notation, but I think what I came up with worked ok.

You may remember that when I was making the liturgical calendar border for the MES banner commission early in 2019, the first one I made was backward.  I really wanted to use it, so I incorporated it into this piece as part of the illuminated "O" at the beginning of "Our".  Because the backwards border was the full size of the banner, using it as only a small part of this quilt meant that the overall Lord's Prayer quilt would be quite large.

This is the border, you can see it next to the original plan for the MES quilt, it's about 20x30 ish.

I designed the interlocking patterns that fill the O and cut them on my silhouette.  The O itself is dark green velvet though it's difficult to see here.

This is the fabric I chose for the background of the whole quilt.  This is actually the back (the front is the shiny red you see in the next picture), but I liked the very subtle texture when you look up close.

I cut all the letters on my silhouette out of some sort of shiny gold fabric and getting everything up there straight was the biggest challenge!  Especially because the musical staff lines also had to be as straight as possible.  Don't you just love that wretched scorch mark?  I was so angry when I did that.  And it's still there in the final quilt, though hopefully not so pronounced.... 

All these little squares were what I used for the musical notes.  I had a bunch left over, and someday I swear I'm going to use them up for something!

Here it is all laid out and ready for quilting.  It's quite large, so it was challenging to quilt on my home machine.  

Those interlocking borders were fused down and then stitched around.  A couple of little edges had to be glued down and unfortunately a little glue globbed out.  I tried a bunch of different solvents to remove the glue, but none were successful and several started dissolving my fabrics!  I was so glad I tested them on this swatch!  In the end I just covered up the glue spot with quilting.

Come back on Monday to see the final piece!

I Like #145

Well!  Hello everyone and welcome to 2020!  I completely missed last week, home for Christmas with my family which meant one million things to like but I forgot to post them!  So this week we have a fairly long list, but I'll cut it down from one million to something more manageable.  I'm looking forward to 2020, but right now still basking in the holiday glow from the last week.

So here we go!


1.  I love my home church!  I got to sing with my parent's church choir for two Sundays plus Christmas eve and helped the parish decorate for Christmas after the 4 Advent service.  Really feels like home.  I also snagged their old altar cover, after several decades, the embroidery had rotted away in the sun, so I re-embroidered it last Sunday afternoon. 

2.  I love the holiday baking!  My mom made homemade panettone twice (delicious), my sister brought tons of beautiful and tasty cookies, I brought tasty but less beautiful cookies, and there was altogether too much delicious food and pie and everything.  Yum.  Now we're all going back to normal eating, so hopefully that will be good.  To be fair, we did eat lots of salad at lunch, but somehow I dont' think it balanced out all the cookies.

3.  I love family games!  No pictures of this one, but we played tons of Catan, both the card game and board game, and bridge, and spinner (a dominoes game) and rummikub, and obsession (aka the victorian ladies game), and uno, and spot it.  Really great fun.  My sister made a box full of balloons that each had a fun activity inside so every time the kids got bored we popped a new balloon!  So creative and wonderful

4.  I love quilting and sewing with my mom!!  She and I had several days to work on projects before my sister arrived, and I'll be sharing more about them as I make progress in the weeks to come.  But here's a small peek at one of the things I'm working on!

5.  I love quilting and sewing with Anna!  My mom helped Anna piece a whole baby quilt, and then also let her do the longarming on a t-shirt quilt Becky got in a church fundraiser.  It was just tied, so Becky wanted to quilt it for extra stability, but Anna had a lot of fun quilting with the longarm (with Muddy's help)!

6. I love playing with both kids!  We did playdoh, and I played pokemon with them, and went swimming and played ball with the dog, and did lots of snuggling and listening to stories.  I got them a book of Scottish fairy tales when I was in Scotland this year as part of their Christmas present.  We read several over the break and boy are some of them weird.  Fun though!

7. I love my family!  I got a couple of good snaps of my grandparents with my dad and his siblings after Christmas dinner.  We also took family pictures of my immediate family.  Some of them turned out really cute, but then my mom wanted to have one with all the people and all the dogs.  It was chaos!!  This was the best one, so it was a good thing we had the other pictures with just the people.  There are supposed to be 7 people and 7 dogs.  See if you can spot everyone.

8.  Then mom thought maybe we could take pictures of just the dogs outside-  that wound up being mostly outtakes too, but we got a few good ones!  I almost adopted another dog over Christmas; on Christmas even our priest and church secretary rescued a mama dog and three pups from a ditch out in the country near a restaurant.  It was a long story, but they (and others eating at the restaurant) had been feeding the mama because she was skin and bones for a while but no one wanted to rescue her because they knew she had pups somewhere. Anyway, by Christmas eve they finally figured out where the pups were and brought them in.  It was so fantastic to be greeted by a great group of dogs at the church office when we went for midnight mass!  I was going to adopt the mama dog (I'm not really a puppy person), but I think the priest decided to keep her (she already has three other dogs) so I know she'll have a good home.

9.  I love hiking in the mountains!  We did a fair number of short hikes up in the mountains with the kids and dogs, and it was so wonderful to get outside and moving around!  Blue DID NOT like the cows, but luckily they were only really close to the trail one day.

There were so many other things to love, most of which I didn't get any pictures of.  But it's really such a wonderful blessing and privilege to have gotten to spend so much time with family I enjoy so much.  Kind of a letdown to be back at work!!   I hope you all had a joyful Christmas!  Click on over to LeeAnna's to find more things to like!