Brains!

 Last fall I went on a recruiting trip to the SACNAS conference to recruit for our OUHSC Biomedical Sciences PhD program.  

To help brighten up our university's booth, I decided to make a few brain quilts to hang.  I didn't really have much time, but I got a couple of our micrographs and had them printed on fun shiny fabric at spoonflower.

I had four prints on the big yard of fabric, I always try to optimize my prints when I do custom spoonflower orders.  The bottom left is a coronal section of the mouse brain stained for blood vessels and the other three are mult-photon micrographs of mouse brain blood vessels taken while through a coverslip mounted on our mouse's skull while the mouse is still alive (so we can measure vessel function).

The two small ones I finished at 12x12 and mounted on wooden frames.  These were raffle giveaways at the booth and were a big hit.

And here are the other two that we hung in the booth that are a big bigger.  They're not super creative in the sense that I just quilted the fabric pictures, but they were fun to hang in the booth.  At some point I'd like to cut these two up and do something more creative with them but for now they're just rolled up in the closet!!

For Your Mercy is Great: Finished

 In a couple of earlier posts this week, I shared in-progress posts about my newest liturgical quilt which is inspired by the Prayers of the People.  

Today I'm back to share the finished quilt.  I'm so pleased with how it turned out, I love the floating globe, and the pushed together letters, and the quilted fish, and the luxurious velvet borders. 

Here you get a good view of the quilted fish and the pink flowers that add a little warmth to the piece.

I love getting to "doodle" quilting in the open spaces,  here I tried to adde a little more warmth but doing some designs with heavy orange and brown thread.  The effect is good but I had some problems with the thread, so the back isn't great.

I tried to make northern Africa golden, in honor of its deserts.  You can see the gold rays that connect the globe to the rest of the quilt (the white is the wall behind the piece). 

In addition to there being leftover prairie dogs up in North America, I had two more prairie dogs in my scrap bin, again all leftover from a quilt from 2014, so I added them down here in the bottom corners where there was space.  I didn't have a great picture of the bottom prairie dog so sorry this one is a big fuzzy.

Here's the final thing one more time. I think it came out really well.  My overall goal was to capture the idea of praying for all people in need around the world, for their health and safety and for wise judgement in our leaders, and for a willingness to work for peace and harmony and especially to conserve our planet.

For Your Mercy is Great, c. 2025, Shannon Conley, 61" x 44"

The artist statement reads:

Part of my ongoing liturgical series, this piece reflects our spiritual charge to care for our world. Each week we pray collectively for the Universal Church, its members, and its mission; the nation and all in authority, he welfare of the world, the concerns of the local community, those who suffer and those in any trouble, and the departed. Prayer is the first step, and care and action are the next. Hear us Lord, for your mercy is great.

For Your Mercy is Great: Continued

 Earlier this week I shared the beginnint stages of the newest quilt in my liturgical series, inspired by the Prayers of the People.  After finishing the top, I layered it to quilt.  As I mentioned before, it was a bit dumb to cut out the central globe first, especially since I wanted to quilt it all together in order to make it as straight as possible. 

There wasn't as much space in this one for extra design elements, but i did quilt these happy fish (they were supposed to be rainbow trout in rememberance of the trout lakes my grandparents used to run, but really look mostly just like fish).

Here you can see my quilting setup and my quilting "helpers".  Mostly I think they want me to stop quilting and go play.

Here you can see the back, it's quilted pretty densely.  I used 100 weight thread around all the letters, and heavier thread for the borders and other decorative elements.

After quilting I wet blocked the whole thing square and then cut out the central globe again.  I wanted it to be suspended floating in the center of the quilt by these golden rays.  Each ray is a piece of peltex enclosed in gold fabric.  In the pictures below they are pinned in "backwards".  Once I got them sewed down, the parts sticking out below were trimmed off and the whole thing was flipped around and faced.

Here you can see blue "helping" again as I hand stitched down the facing around the globe,  you can see the finished edges of the rays sticking out.  I also faced the inner edge of the cut circle on the main quilt (where it looks raggedy in the picture above), and the outer edge of the whole quilt so that all the cut edges were nicely finished.

Come back on Friday to see the final quilt.

New Quilt: For Your Mercy is Great

Since 2013 I've been working on a series of quilts inspired by parts of the Episcopal worship services, mostly our Eucharistic service but also a few parts of our daily office (see all the parts of the series here and here).  There are a few pieces left for the series to be complete and one of them is the Prayers of the People.

This is a part of the service each week where we pray for others, and there are a bunch of different forms in our prayer book, but my favorite is Form VI.

From the Book of Common Prayer, 1982

Form VI

In peace, we pray to you, Lord God.

Silence

For all people in their daily life and work;
For our families, friends, and neighbors, and for those who are alone.

For this community, the nation, and the world;
For all who work for justice, freedom, and peace.

For the just and proper use of your creation;
For the victims of hunger, fear, injustice, and oppression.

For all who are in danger, sorrow, or any kind of trouble;
For those who minister to the sick, the friendless, and the needy.

For the peace and unity of the Church of God;
For all who proclaim the Gospel, and all who seek the Truth.

For [N. our Presiding Bishop, and N. (N.) our Bishop(s); and for] all bishops and other ministers;
For all who serve God in his Church.

For the special needs and concerns of this congregation.

Hear us, Lord;
For your mercy is great.

We thank you, Lord, for all the blessings of this life.

We will exalt you, O God our King;
And praise your Name for ever and ever.

We pray for all who have died, that they may have a place in
your eternal kingdom.

Lord, let your loving-kindness be upon them;
Who put their trust in you.

So that was the text I wanted to feature and the overall design idea was to feature a globe in the center surrounded by the text.  I wanted the globe to be floating in the middle of the quilt, and for some stupid reason I cut it out of my background fabric at the very begining.  There was no need for that, and it make things harder throughout but it worked out in the end.  

For the globe I used all my scraps of silk and organza and polyester to mosaic in the continents and oceans.  If you look closely you'll see two gian prairie dogs in North America that were leftover from this very long ago art quilt (2013-2014!).  I love using scrappy bits from the stash.

I did the mosaic part of the globe at our 4 Common Corners retreat last October and finished the final quilt sometime in early March this year I think.

The background fabric is a piece of dupioni silk that I dyed over Christmas 2023.

My silhouette cutter is pretty much at the end of it's life cycle and really isn't cutting well anymore, so I cut all the letters for this piece on my mom's Brother scan-n-cut.  And unlike other pieces with cut letters, these letters weren't in straight lines so getting them lined up on the quilt was tricky.  I would up using ironable transfer tape which enabled me to pick up big groups of letters of the cutting mat and position them as one, then iron down the letters, then remove the tape.  The transfer tape is what you see below that looks like clear plastic.

The words on the bottom of the circle go with the prayers I shared above, and the words at the top read "Hear us Lord" and "For your mercy is great."

Becuase I was going for a meditative repetitive feel, I wanted the letters to be reasonably low contrast and to run together.  So there are no spaces between workds and the colors blend with the background a little.  It's legible if you get close, but from afar just looks like a big block of text, like the feeling of praying over and over under your breath.

I had a bunch of velvet in my stash from Georgia (who was also the source of the silk- thanks Georgia!) and I wanted to use some of it for the borders.  I auditioned a couple of different colors.  The diamonds are also for the borders and designed to pull colors from the globe.

I wound up deciding to actually use three colors for the border, the gold to pick up the center , the intense dark turquoise, and the sage green.  They were a pain to piece even though just long strips because the velvets are bulky and don't like to feed evenly in my sewing machine, the gold is really lightweight and all of them are very slippery slinky.  I guess that's the penalty for using things that aren't cotton!

After assembling the borders I realized the whole quilt was looking really blue (literally) and needed some contrast.  One of the brocades in the globe had some pink accents and the whole quilt felt like it needed some warmth so I decided to make some pink flowers to go in the borders.  It meant cutting out a million little petals in five different shapes, but I think it added a great spark to the border. A bunch of these were fabrics I'd previously painted so up close they have some nice variation.

Come back later in the week for more on this project!

New Quilt: The Monsters

 Back in 2022 my mom was working on a quilt of all our many rescued dogs over the years.  She made  custom silk screens for many decades of family dogs and printed them on pieced fabric blocks.  Her quilt turned out great; it's called "Best Beloved".  This isn't all our family dogs, but it's most of them from the past 50 years.  Only a couple are missing,  notably my parents' dogs Kachina and Marigold, but really she got almost all of them. 

From top left (those with * have gone over rainbow bridge): Swatch, Jackson*, Jordy*, Maggie the elder*, Gibby*, Cab*, Auto, Fawn*, Skunk*, Mac*, Taxi*, Maggie the younger*, Swatch and Shooter*, Blue, Wrinkles*, Shooter*, Missy*, Pumpkin*, Calais*, Bentley*, Bullett*, Spooky, Talute*, Checker, Jenny*, Angel*, Boo* and Cassie*, ?, Pepper* and Peanut*, Strider*

Shortly after she made all the silk screens, I was at home visiting and decided to use her process to make one of Brett's dog Cash, and made this wall hanging for him as a birthday present.

But at the same time I decided to make a few prints of the dogs of mine that were on mom's quilts.  Making the screens was a lot of work for her and I thought they were super cute so I went ahead and printed plain blocks featuring all of my dogs that she'd had on there figuring some day I'd do something with them. 

Not too long ago I was desperately searching for something else (not tellin what at this point) and came across the blocks and decided I should just make them into a quilt.  They weren't doing any good sitting in a drawer and I love seeing the pups and I loved all the bright colors.  In the same drawer were a bunch of English Paper Piecing flowers I'd started years ago and I felt like their scrappy fun vibe fit with the blocks.  

A few years ago I had been into EPP for handwork, but the needle wound up hurting my hands and I set them aside in favor of other handwork, mostly knitting and embroidery. But I had several put together and a bunch more cut out and in little baggies.  I just wound up piecing all the leftover ones together by machine and then using them for this project.  I named it The Monsters because that's what I (lovingly) always call the pups.  I love all the bright colors and rainbow threads and flower garden blocks and especially the pictures of the pups.

The Monsters, 2025, 40x40 c. Shannon Conley

Bentley*

Spooky

Bullett*

Missy*

Blue

Shooter*

Pumpkin*

Angel*

This is just a happy quilt.  I'm so pleased to have made something fun with the blocks and to have it up on my wall so I can see all my monsters whenever I walk into the room.  

Cottonwood: Finished

 Earlier in the week I shared about a new quilt I recently finished inspired by the cottonwood trees we were surrounded by during a recent 4 Common Corners retreat.  today I'm back to share the final quilt. 

After finishing the piecing, I quilted it with largely abstract quilting surrounding a central tree quilted into the background.  It's quilted pretty densely, mostly because I like quilting but also because with the differing weights of fabric it turned out pretty bubbly.  This was defnitely a "quilt it out" situation.

I'd originally thought about incorporating some pom-poms but once I finished it I was happy with it as-is and didn't think it needed any added stuff.

That purple fabric with the hexagons is one I printed,  I love that fabric and only had some small pieces.  So happy to get to use it.

You can see here I had a hard time turning the thick eduges right at the top of the central peak.  But I loved getting to use the random orange and green striped velvet I dyed a while back.  The yellow and purple is silk I also dyed.  The yellow with the tiny polka dots in the top right is from an old necktie.

Here you can see the branches a little better in the quilting.  I also enjoyed adding a little blue in the quilting and piecing at the top to evoke the New Mexico sky.

Bringing forth life and giving growth, c. Shannon Conley, 2025, 50"H x 39"W

In the end the quilt gave me the feel of the tunnel of leaves with light shining through, but also the feel of a stained glass window.  It makes me feel joyous exploring God's creation and I decided to name it "Bringing forth life and giving growth" from Isaiah 55:10-12

For as rain and snow fall from the heavens
and return not again, but water the earth,
Bringing forth life and giving growth,
seed for sowing and bread for eating,
So shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.
For you shall go out in joy,
and be led back in peace;
The mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song,
and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.

Isaiah 55: 10-12

In the end, the piecing isn't perfect and there are a few spots where that really bugs me, but I love the glow and the colors and I love seeing all my wonderful fabrics out and shining.

New Quilt: Cottonwood

 Our 4 Common Corners call for the first third of this year was Cottonwood, inspired by our retreat last year in northern New Mexico up near the 4 Corners Region.  

We were there in October and the trees were in all their gorgeous yellow glory along the river that flows behind the place we had the retreat.

I had lots of pictures of the trees, but I decided to take a more abstract approach.  I actually started with all these gradient pom poms I'd made but never done anything with and thought I'd make a quilt in yellows and oranges and then accent it with the pom poms.  

I had this abstract idea in my head of tree branches arching overhead in a tunnel of natural beauty, so I drafted a fairly simple pattern and decided I would paper piece/string piece with oranges and yellows and use purples and browns for the "branches".  

It's all weird fabrics, velvets, upholstery fabric, silk, pseudo-suede, weird melty non-wovens, and whatever other non-cottons I found in the scrap bins.  I foundation pieced it on fusable interfacing.  One main challenge was that the fabrics varied radically in weight making it challenging to piece and quilt but I got there.

It was reall fun to use up lots of scrappy stuff from the stash,  just looking at these pictures I see lots of fabrics samples I've painted, dyed, and printed over the years and I love seeing them incorporated into something. 

Come back later this week to see the final quilt!