New Quilt: Kirigami 3#: Open Windows

One tiny benefit of being cooped up with no ability to go anywhere is that I've found time to catch up on blogging about projects I've completed over the last several months.  Someday I'll catch up with the backlog and maybe get back to blogging about current projects!!  This is another in my Kirigami series.  This one started with this piece of painted fabric I found in the magic Georgia boxes.  She must have painted it sometime in the past, but it was the right size to cut up and I was glad to be able to use it.  I loved the colors and the strong vertical lines, so I tried to incorporate those into my cut pattern.  Below you can see the quilted sandwich.

This was my paper mockup for this piece but I decided instead of having peaks going on the left, middle and right, I'd have the peaks slowly transition from one side to the other.

Here it is after cutting and sewing the fold creases.  Because each cut bit was so skinny, and because of the general lack of rigidity in the fabric,  these pieces were extremely floppy. After playing with them for a while I decided there was no way I could get them to stand up like the paper mockup.  Fabric stiffener would have helped them stand up, but achieving the nice straight lines you get with paper just wasn't feasible.

I decided on an approach that still used fabric stiffener to give stiffness, but in which the segments were piled off to the side.  This way they could pile up on top of each other making it easier to sculpt.  Come back tomorrow to see the finished piece!

Baby Quilt for Priya

A friend of mine from work is having a baby imminently and at the beginning of March we had a baby shower for her right before everything shut down.  Unfortunately I forgot about it until two days before so I was on a tight turnaround for making a quilt!  I've really been on a no-fabric-buying track for the past couple of years, but the tight time frame was enough that I felt ok going to get a pre-printed panel from JoAnns.  This one was designed to be made into a fabric book or pillows or something, but I just cut out the squares and bordered them with things from my stash.  Quick and easy!

All four blocks are adorable, but I think my favorite is the one with the turtle and hedgehog. The baby is a girl, and I thought it was a good balance of pink but not PINK.  I pray for the safety of Priya and her baby as she's born during this chaotic time!

And using the panels also reminded me of the pre-printed panel quilt I made when Anna was born.  It's so weird to think about,  we didn't know her back then (she wasn't born yet of course), and we called her the animal cracker.  She turned 8 last week (we sang happy birthday on Zoom), and I can't imagine not having her in my life. 

This one for Anna was another from my panel+scrap stash, and that binding has neon frogs and was made out of my college dorm curtains.

I Like #159

I've been really loving the Alexa 70s Folk and Gordon Lightfoot playlists.  Really a fun selection of music.  I like that Alexa knows enough of my tastes to generally pick things I like when I ask her to play music!  Great for singing along, reminds me of being a kid.

I've been walking in my neighborhood with the dogs every afternoon when I finish work.  I'm super lucky that my neighborhood isn't super crowded with people out (though more than normal), so we can easily stay well over six feet away from people.  I'm really struggling with Easter and Holy Week this year, so it made me very happy to see these people (and several more) in the neightborhood who decorated their mailboxes for Easter!

The pups are good!  Bentley has discovered the under-counter snuggle spot now as well.  I think he likes it because it's easy to get to.  that's cotton batting (covered of course) they're sitting on, but I think I need to move it and just put a dog bed under there.  Even covered I worry the batting will get dirty.

Blue unfortunately discovered my zucchini snickerdoodle bread.  Argh!

I love having random sewing supplies in my studio!  Over the years I've inherited tons of random stuff, this week of great benefit was a roll of 40 yards of bias strip (thank goodness for my little $2 bias folder) and about 6 packs of bias binding tape.  I never had a use for any of it before, but this week with the revised CDC recommendations, lots more entities here have been requesting masks, so I made two dozen for the OKC Fire Department as well as a handful for me and my friends.  

I finished (and blogged about!) my jellyroll socks this week.  It was a really fun knitting project that used up a bunch of leftover yarn (yay!).  Click here to see more about that project.

I also blogged about another in my series of kirigami quilts,  here's a closeup, for more, check out the posts here, and here.

I hope you all are staying in and staying safe.  Click over to LeeAnna's for more things to like!

Kirigami Quilt #2-Finished!

Yesterday, I shared the in-progress shots of my latest Kirigami quilt.  Today I'll share some pictures of the finished piece!  One interesting thing about this series is that I've really had to think about the order of operations, because once the piece is sculpted and stiff it's really hard to work on!  This typically means a weird assembly order and putting on "finishing" touches like the pocket and label somewhere during the middle of the process.  The colors on this were accentuated with Shiva Paintsticks and I really like their ability to add subtle variation and emphasize certain shapes.  Each triangle/chevron point is stitched down and then the shapes were stiffened with Golden Fabric stiffener so they stay pooched out.   I'm rally pleased with how this one turned out,  the fairly large cut shapes adapted well to fabric.  I also really liked how the color variation in the painted silk I put on the background played so nicely with both the dark front and beach back of the main piece.  

Kirigami #2, c. Shannon Conley, 2020.  32" x 18"  Photo c. Mike Cox

New Quilt: Kirigami #2

Here's another in my ongoing series of Kirigami Quilts!  Once again I started with plain fabric and painted it thwn quilted it.  I love the bright neon thread on the fairly dark rainbow background. And because the kirigami quilts depend are enhanced by contrast between the front and the back,  the back of the quilt sandwich is the peach/orange/red in the second picture.

This is the kirigami pattern I decided to try.  I liked the shapes made by the chevrons/triangles and it seemed sufficiently simple to adapt well to fabric.  I've enjoyed cutting paper mockups using my silhouette cutter.

Here you can see it after I cut it on the laser cutter.  I like the shapes, but didn't like the white showing through, so I backed the whole thing with a piece of silk I painted last fall.  

Here you can see the turquoise silk backing.  Like I have on previous pieces, I bound the edges using a couched yarn.  In this case, because the cute pieces were fairly big and simple in shape, I also couched the yarn along the edges of the cut triangles.  Come back tomorrow to see the finished piece!!

Jellyroll Socks: Finished

After finishing the socks I made for my mom for Christmas,  I decided to make a scrappy pair using all the miscellaneous yarn I had left from the last few projects: leftover neon pink, leftover neon yellow, and leftover half black half rainbow.  After seeing my friend Barb make this pattern I fell in love with the nested rolled cuffs.  Back in the 80s we used to wear stacked slouch socks in multiple colors with our stirrup leggings (all the rage in third grade).  I remember my mom getting mad because it meant so many pairs of socks in the wash.  Anyway, I loved this contemporary update and since I had so many little bits of 80s-inspired neon colors, I thought it was propitious.  I also liked that they were ankle socks- we're entering the 3/4 length legging season and my regular knit socks look a bit funny with those, so I was glad to make a shorter pair.  Of course lately I'm not wearing socks at all (one of the few benefits of being home is that I haven't worn any shoes but flip-flops for days-even to walk the dog).

The pattern is called Jelly Rolls, and you can find it here on ravelry.  It's an easy to follow clear pattern.  I was using it as "idiot knitting" and part of the reason I finished them recently is because they were easy to work on while on the many zoom meetings I've been attending recently.

These knit from the cuff down and you knit each cuff separately and then knit them together.  I knit both socks at the same time like I always do, but there are a couple of places where the color changes aren't in exactly the same spot because some of my little leftover bits ran out at weird spots.  Here I am looking dorky knitting together two sets of cuffs.  Becky took this picture early in March, the last weekend we were together in person before the stay-at-home orders started rolling in.

I usually knit sock using a no heel turn method, and this is the first pair I knit that were cuff down.  I somehow managed to skip over the part about the heel flap and went straight to the heel turn.  I couldn't figure out how to pick up stitches, and had brief argument with my mother who thought I really probably did need a heel flap and I was sure this pattern didn't have one.  Of course sure enough I did need a heel flap and wound up ripping out all the short rows in the heel turns.  Sigh.  And then I picked up the heel stitches backwards.  I'm not sure where I went wrong but it meant I had to purl the whole foot.

I was so excited, this was all the yarn that was left!  I feel like there's almost always a weirdly small leftover ball you can't do anything with or you run out three rows from the end.

And just to have everything I've made with this (now-consumed) yarn:

Hotel of Bees Shawl

Neon Slouch Socks

Witchy Socks

Neon socks for Mom

Jellyroll Socks

I Like #158

Hi All!  In the middle of all our craziness, I have noticed that my likes are a combination of the very wide world (virtual) and the very close by (my backyard).  What a weird world.

1.  I'm loving all the zoom meetings.  I've "seen" more of my extended family (aunts, uncles, cousins) than in a long, long time.  Really fantastic!  We had a virtual birthday party for my Grandma last Friday night (she turned 92) everyone got to be there!  My cousin even announced that he and his long-term partner got married last week!  Congratulations to Doug and Victoria!  It's always made us smile because my parents are also named Doug and Victoria (though my mom goes by Vicki).  And on the other entertaining duplicate name coincidence, My sister and her husband are named Rebecca and Andrew, and so are their married best friends!  Funnily enough, they have opposing nicknames,  my sister and her husband are Becky and Andrew while their best friends are Rebecca and Andy.


2. And friends too!  We had a wonderful visit with a group of the I like bloggers and it was really fun to see everyone in person!  Would there be interest in doing another virtual meet-up?  Weekends are best for me but I can do pretty much any time except Sunday morning so if people want to comment when would work, I can set something up.

3.  Plants!  My mother of thousands, which usually reproduced by making new babies on the edge of its leaves has started to bloom with flowers!  They are gorgeous hanging pink blossoms.  I didn't even know it could bloom!!  She'll move outside as soon as it's warmed up just a little more.

4. And outside flora too! My apple trees are at that wonderful stage where lots of the blossoms are fully white and open but there are still lots of pink buds to add some color.  So fab. I potted a bunch of dahlia bulbs, marigold seeds, and zinna seeds this week in my two sad flower beds and in the containers I had.  My eyes were bigger than my desire to dig new beds when I ordered bulbs last fall, so I had some extra.  I decided to plant them in dog food sacks!  I hope it works well, and I like the idea of reusing them!

5.  The pups!  Duh!  They are really enjoying having me home but I think they wish I would play more with them and work less!

6.  Sewing!  I just finished up a four month push of new artwork for a show (that has of course been postponed now) and took the opportunity this week to do some piecing.  I got out my 11 years of valentines blocks from my mom and started piecing.  I used all stuff from my scrap bin, and it was really fun and freeing.  The 2019 and 2020 blocks have to wait until next year since I didn't have quite enough for another row.  I generally am not a piecer, but I really enjoyed working on these.  Maybe I'll make a scrappy quilt this spring just for fun.  We'll see.

7.  Embroidery!  I like free-form embroidery, and I started this prayer book cover almost two years ago.  I haven't worked on it much since about six months after I started it because I've been knitting in my handwork time, but I've discovered that Zoom meetings are a great opportunity for handwork.  There's a long way to go, but I'm enjoying it.  The background is actually an iridescent dark blue, not black.

I hope everyone is staying sane and has a good week!  Click on over to LeeAnna's for more positivity!