I Like #278

 It's been a whirlwind week here.  My mom and I drove down to Houston to spend two days at the International Quilt Festival which as always was really inspiring.  I gave a lecture on my 3D work and led two tours of one of the SAQA exhibitions.  Mom and I had a lovely time walking through the quilts and booths and ended with sore feet and lots of inspiration. I didn't take very many pictures, but here are a few.

There was a whole exhibit of Zena Thorpes exquisite applique quilts that I loved.  Lots of her pieces were inspired by illuminated manuscripts which of course I love.  They're all quite big with the most amazin teeny-tiny turned edge applique.  This piece was inspired by the Book of Kells.

Bee Sewcial had a fantastic exhibit of their modern bee quilts, I think overall it was my favorite special exhibit at the show.  They led a walk-through and it was great to hear from all the quilters in the group and hear about their process.

Frank Klein, a major art quilt support and collector, had a show with selections from his collection at IQF.  Two favorites from that group were Pat Bishop's Owl

And Naomi Velazquez' 3D piece.  I loved the way she colored (dyed? painted?) the batting so that it becomes an integral part of the design.

There were tons of amazing quilts in the judged show, but one particular favorite was this hand appliqued, hand quilted piece by Japanese quilter Hideko Kawai.  I love all the fish and undersea creatures and I love that they all have little creatures appliqued inside them!

On Saturday afternoon we drove back to Dallas so we could spend Sunday with my sister celebrating her 40th birthday.  We had a wonderful day, playing games with the kids and hanging out, and then in the afternoon we played an (unlicensed) Harry Potter murder mystery game.  It was so fun,  we all had to dress up and act our characters and figure out who stole the philosopher's scone.  I was Luna Lovegood and Mom was Professor McGonagall.  It turned out Becky's friend who was playing Moaning Myrtle was the thief.  Everybody got really into it and we had lots of laughing.  Afterwards we had a birthday party for her and all in all it was a great day.

I also kept on with the catching-up-on-blogging this week, sharing a post about my second Ice phase diagram quilt.  Read more about it here.

I left Spooky with a house sitter while we were gone and took Blue to Becky's.  Unfortunately early Friday morning all three pups (Blue and Becky's two) were sprayed by a skunk really bad.  Becky and Andrew had to bathe all three multiple times which is such an awful task, especially with Blue who just hates baths.  He's still a little stinky, but she really got most of it out.

It's such a special thing to be able to spend time with my family.  I'm always so grateful for the opportunity.  Coming back early Monday meant that this week at work has been crazy, but I'll be home this weekend (mostly) so hopefully I can get caught up a bit.  Hoping you have all had good things this week!  Click over to LeeAnna's for more things to like!

New Quilt: Ice 2

 Last week I shared a couple of posts about a new quilt I made based on the phase diagram for ice.  I mentioned that I'd cut out the crystal structures on my silhouette cutter and of course, when you do that, there's always the inside and the outside.  I wound up using the "inside" or "negatives" for the first quilt (below), but I saved the "outside" or "positives" (second picture) for a second piece!

in the original piece the background was a solid piece of white, but for this one I fused the blue/green crystal pieces down onto a variety of purple and brown fabrics from my stash and then pieced them together.  I love all the extra visual interest that comes from having multiple colors of background fabrics.  And it's also interesting to see how different some of the cute pieces look on these backgrounds vs. the ones above. 

As always I quilted in lots of fun colors- I love using bright and contrasting threads in my quilting. As in the prior piece the edges of the crystal sections didn't come together perfectly so I couched down some wonderful fuzzy purple yarn between sections.  It's the same yarn I used to finish the edges and I think serves to bring the whole thing together.  The yarn is actually a recent addition to my stash, my friend Gail de-stashed it into my collection when she saw me in Santa Fe.  I guess I seemed like someone who needed fuzzy purple yarn and I can attest that that is true!  Thanks Gail!

I was initially going for a color scheme of purple and blue, but lots of the cut crystal shapes trended more toward gray or gray green,  and many of the purple fabrics in my stash trended toward brown.  The resulting color scheme is a little non-traditional, but I think it's interesting and I like it even more than the first white/blue one.

I really enjoyed being able to make two pieces with the same cut fabric and not having to waste all the leftovers that come off the silhouette.  I have several bins of little bits of fusible backed fabric that resulted from that and it's so nice to use 100% of the cutting material sometimes!  

I Like #277

 Welcome to another week of things to like.  We had lovely fall weather this week, a little rain, a little cool, but not cold yet.  

Our prompt from LeeAnna this week is our favorite pumpkin baked goods.  I love baking with pumpkin, and I like every pumpkin baked good I've ever had except pumpkin pie (I'm just not crazy about the texture.  I think I my favorite recipe is for pumpkin oatmeal chocolate chip cookies.

I like catching up on blogging!  I blogged this week about a quilt I finished this summer based on the phase diagram for ice.  You can read more about it here and here.

I broke one of my favorite pottery cups this week-it was really sad, it was one of the last pieces I had from a glaze my mom used only very very early in her career (the brown with the dark brown spots).  I decided to make some earrings out of some of the broken shards.  Not as nice as having my cup, but better than nothing.  And I love stash-using-crafts.

The pups looking adorable on the sofa.  Unfortunately, Spooky has been on a sofa-eating rampage this week.

We're doing a [non-licensed] Harry Potter mystery game for my sister's birthday, so I made some happy Harry Potter witch hats for my sister's friend Katie and my mom who didn't have any yet.  I like doing small fun stash-crafts.

The flowers are still blooming which makes me very happy.  Unfortunately I have a wretched infestation of cucumber beetles (green with the black spots on the yellow dahlia below) and they are just eating holes in all the flower petals.

Wishing everyone a good week, and don't forget to vote next Tuesday! Click over to LeeAnna's for more things to like!

Phase Diagram: Ice-Finished

Last week I shared about my new quilt based on the ice phase diagram.  Here's where we left off last time- all the different crystal structures fused down ready to be quilted.  I quilted each section  with a different pattern and color of thread including lots of brigh and rainbow colors.  As a final step, I couched yarn down between each section.  I thought it needed a visual barrier to separate each section, some of them were running together and leading to a jumbled feeling and I think the yarn outlines the spaces nicely.  In addition the edges of each different crystal section didn't line up exactly so couching down the yarn was a good way to cover that up.

And here's the final piece!  The top white section is the region of the phase diagram associated with liquid water, so I filled it with quilting that felt flowy as well as continued quilting patterns from some of the adjacent crystal sections.

Phase Diagram: Ice, 38" x 37", Shannon Conley, c. 2022

I love the way this turned out, another nerdy science quilt for me!

New Quilt: ICE!!

    One of the calls for entry for our fiber artists group 4 Common Corners was Snow and Ice.  I decided to take the nerdy approach for this piece again.  Ice has many many different crystal structures depending on what the temperature and pressure is.  Very few occur here on earth, but they occur in all kinds of crazy places in the universe like in giant ice planets and in the very upper reaches of the atmosphere where precipitation is nucleating.  Scientists are still identifying new crystalline forms for ice (including many that aren't even stable) and it's a really interesting area of research.  

    I decided my quilt should be based on a phase diagram for ice; phase diagrams depict the range of temperatures and pressures at which you find any particular compound in its solid, liquid, and gaseous forms, and it's especially cool for ice because it has so many different solid (crystal and amorphous) forms. There are quite a few different phase diagrams depending on what range of temperatures and pressures you're studying, but I decided to go with this one, from a 2019 Nature paper.

You can see the regions of the phase diagram where all the different forms of solid ice are found (labeled with roman numerals).  I wanted to fill each shape with some pattern abstracted from the different crystal structures of ice.  Most of the ice on earth is hexagonal ice, form 1h, seen over at the far left and its crystal structure is pretty straightforward.

When I started googling around to see what the crystal structures of the other forms of ice are, I found  Frank Hoffman's fascinating website.  He's an academic chemist and has a personal website/blog dedicated to crystal structures including lots of different molecular models for different ice crystal structures.  This first one is Ice IX and ice XV.  The second is one of my favorites, Ice II

I abstracted some cut patterns from all these different illustrations of ice crystal structures and then cut them out on my silhouette cutter.  At furst I thought I'd use the outline of the crystals, I guess you'd call it the positive of the crystal pattern, but there was too much white space so I decided to use the negative for this one, that is, what was left over from the cutting after I removed the crystal outlines. 

Stay tuned though, I saved these outlines to make a second piece with a similar design!  The fabrics are all ones I've handpainted or dyed over the years, mostly silk and polyester.  The background is some sort of white polyester with a slight shine to it.

You can see here  (below) the layout in progress with the "negatives" rather than the "positives" (above)

All the pieces were fused down- come back next week to see the quilting and the final piece!

I Like #276

 Welcome to another week of things to like!  

I had a good week this week!  My sister and her kids came up over the weekend and we had a great time.  We played lots of games and did some sewing and crafting, and my friend Brett worked with them on a geology scout badge.  

As part of the geology scout badge we went on a hike to hunt rose rocks, the state rock (crystal?) of Oklahoma.  They're these really cool barite crystals/rocks that form in the Garber sandstone which is our primary rock formation in this area.  The lakes are really low right now (it's been sadly so so dry) but that does mean that lots of beach is exposed so we found lots and lots of cool rose rocks.  These are just the ones I kept.  Alex and Anna collected bunches-  Alex filled up his pockets with tons and tons, he had to hold his pants to keep them from falling down.

Last weekend I tried to install a fan in my home office, but alas I discovered I needed a different junction box, and this weekend a friend of mine asked one of his friends who is an electrician to swap the junction box and hang the fan.  I'm very excited (perhaps unreasonably excited) because the room has always been really stuffy.

The weather has been beautiful temperature wise,  a bit rainy (thank heavens, finally).  It's meant more and more hand knits are coming out.  This week I got out the sweater I finished last fall.  It's another one some people have told me they think is ugly, but I really like it-  the yarn is lightweight so it's not super hot.  Apologies for the work bathroom mirror selfie, I promise no one else was in there and I don't have a full-length mirror at home.

This week's prompt from LeeAnna was costumes we've liked as a kid and an adult.  We had lots of fun costumes as kids, all made by my mom, but I don't have easy acess to many of the pictures. I love dressing up though, so I do have some favorite as-an-adult costumes.  I don't usually make ones that are too complicated, and I usually try to use all stash stuff if I can.

One year I was a jellyfish (very hard to navigate from room-to-room at the halloween party)

One year I went as a Lt.Cdr from TNG (I couldn't resist photoshopping myself onto the bridge)

One year I went as a fruit fly (can you sense the nerd theme?)

And just to close out, here's the cute spooky picture of the week!

I hope everyone is finding things to like this week!  Click over to LeeAnna's for more goodness!