Grazing With Armadillos

In 2004, when I was in graduate school out in Tucson, my sister graduated from Austin College in Sherman, Texas.  I went out with my family for her graduation, and on the road home the talk turned to armadillos.  My grandmother had a stuffed armadillo toy and I expressed a desire to see one for real.  Sometime later, my sister saw a dead one on the side of the road and pointed it out to me. I expressed great sadness at the death of the poor baby animal, and became quite belligerent when my sister told me it was a perfectly normal full-grown armadillo.  I haughtily informed her that she had no idea what she was talking about, and that full-grown armadillos were about the size of cows.  Everyone in the car burst out laughing, as I was very insistent.

She finally convinced me that armadillos were not, in fact, anywhere close to cow sized, but I've never been able to live that down, and everyone is always quick to point out that my advanced degrees are in the biological sciences.  Of course, now living in Oklahoma, armadillos are very common (especially on the side of the road), but I'd never seen a real one until that trip through Texas. My entire knowledge of them came from a fabulous, Graeme Base book called Animalia.  Graeme Base is a children's author and wonderful illustrator, and Animalia is a great alphabet book.  In retrospect, the giant alligator wearing an apron covered with an alphabet stomping on an ant, abacus, ambulance, asp, apple, and alien all of which were the same size should have been a clue that the armadillo in the picture might not be quite to scale.  Nonetheless, it was enough to thoroughly convince me that my knowledge of armadillos highly outweighed that of my sister who'd actually lived around them for several years.

Tell me that armadillo does not look cow sized!

This Christmas, my mom surprised me with this wonderful art quilt immortalizing the dreadful armadillo story.  The center panel is from a cow T-shirt she'd bought me from an artist many years ago at a festival in Copper Mountain, Colorado.  The shirt was old, but was a favorite and I gave it to her to test out some interfacing she wanted to use.  I had no idea she'd make such a fun, involved art quilt out of it; it's covered with fabulous beading, 3 dimensional prairie points, and of course, the slightly-more-to-scale armadillo beads. Everybody had a good laugh at me again when I opened it, but in the end I had the last word; as I was examining the label, I noticed she misspelled the word armadillo, and reminded her that her inability to spell long pre-dated my misunderstanding of dasypodidae biology.

Grazing with Armadillos, Vicki Conley, 2012.  Photo c. Doug Conley

Grazing With Armadillos, Detail, Vicki Conley, 2012

Grazing With Armadillos, Detail, Vicki Conley, 2012

I'm so excited to have received such a great present, I really love the quilt!  I'm going to link up with the Art Quilt linky over at the great Nina Marie's  and with Elizabeth at a  Pieceful life. You should check them, out, there are always really fabulous things.

Jolly Ranchers: A value exercise

Over at the fabulous Stitched in Color, Rachel has been leading a value added quilt along challenging us to incorporate and consider value as a critical design element in quilts.  I've certainly found that in quilts where I make an effort to include a wide range of values, the outcome is definitely more striking.  As soon as I saw this series of posts,  I thought of a quilt my mom made several years ago, and thought I'd share it!

My mom and I designed this quilt and she made it a few years ago when we were baby beginner quilters.  I think it was probably the second quilt she made.  It lives now on the guest bed in my sister's old room so I was lucky enough to get to sleep under it when I was just there for thanksgiving.

When I first drafted the block for this we thought it was original, but quickly realized otherwise, I think it's just what you'd call a wonky log cabin block.  What I think really makes this quilt special is how the color selection makes the block disappear giving a great sense of motion.

One of the things I've always thought contributed significantly to the design, specifically to the sense of depth and motion is the range of values in the pinks and greens.  I think the dark light transition of the green and purple adds a lot of visual interest to the design.  Mom named the quilt Jolly Ranchers since the intense colors reminded her of the grape and apple candies.

Jolly Ranchers, c. Vicki Conley, 2007, 78" x 90"

back

Hope you enjoy this quilt, I really love it and am so glad she kept it!

I'm going to go ahead and link up with the value added flickr group and QAL linky; Rachel said it was okay even thought it wasn't a new quilt since I haven't shared before.  

Many thanks to her and her co-hosts for their fun posts!

Baby Quilts from Mrs. Fuchs

Today, one more set of old baby quilts and then I promise we'll return to the current era.

When I was in New Mexico over the holidays we were all excited about the baby quilts for my sister's soon-to-arrive (and oft referred to) baby.  In the process we started going through my mom's cedar chest to look at some of our old baby things so I thought I'd take the opportunity to snap some pictures of some of our baby quilts.

These two in particular are just beautiful.  They were made for me and my sister by a dear friend of my grandmother's named Ruby Fuchs.

According to our records, Mrs. Fuchs passed away in 1982, the year my sister was born, and I think this quilt she made for Becky was probably one of her last.  Both quilts are completely hand pieced and hand quilted and are lovely pieces to preserve.

Do any of you have old handmade items from your childhood?  I always love to get these out and look at them, and feel blessed to have such special mementos.

Aunt Janet's Baby Quilt

Today I have a baby quilt to show from my own childhood.  This one was made by my Aunt Janet,  my mom's best friend from high school.  She doesn't quilt anymore, but I love this one she made for me when I was a baby.

We were lucky enough to have a visit from Janet and her mother Peggy over the Christmas holiday, so I took the chance to snap a picture of her and the quilt (that's my mom's arm).

This quilt has a bunch of fun textures,  the sheep and cows are terrycloth and the fence is corduroy.  The  rest of the animals are all small calico style prints.  I'm especially fond of the rooster.

I brought this one home with me and am excited to hang it in the new studio once it gets finished! 

Becky's Baby Quilts

A while back I showed you the baby quilt I made for the Animal Cracker, my soon to arrive nephew or niece.  My mom's been working on a very detailed alphabet quilt to hang on the wall for the baby (which I'll show another day), but several good friends of ours have also made really lovely quilts for the baby.  Its such a blessing to have so many crafty friends!

This one was made for the baby by our long-time friend Evelyn Genta.  I love the soft colors and the great block!  She put this fun footprint/handprint on the back too so it's super cute on both sides!

This one was made for the baby by our good friend/distant cousin Helgi Osterriech.  All of the center blocks are super fun prints, some with lots of fun stuff to look at.  It's almost "I spy" like.

And this final one was made by my mom as a throw-on-the floor sister quilt to the alphabet sampler.  It uses the leftover fabric from that quilt- I just love the dominos and animals and letters in that print.  It reminds me of the Graeme Base book Animalia.

So there you are!  This will be one warm baby with all these quilts!

Shannon's Eye of the Storm: Guest Quilt

I hope everyone had a fabulous and joyful Thanksgiving.  We had such a lovely time with my parents in New Mexico; Mike got to relax in the armchair with his iPad and the football games while my Mom and I scurried around quilting and crafting as much as possible.

My blog isn't important enough to have guest posters, but today I have "guest quilt" to share with you.  My mother, Vicki Conley, is a talented potter and "real" art quilter (as opposed to I, who am an art-quilter-wannabe-who-is-still-figuring-out-how-to-have-even-free-motion-stitches).  She is super-awesome and always working on a million projects, but she doesn't blog so I've decided to feature some of her fabulous quilts occasionally so people can see them!

The lovely quilt one I have for you today is called "Shannon's Eye of the Storm".  My mom started it in 2009 at an Empty Spools quilting seminar with Janet Fogg (who also makes super-incredible art quilts).  She had several goals for the project, one of them was to incorporate traditional piecing, specifically the storm at sea block, into an art quilt.  In my non-quilting life, I'm an eye-disease researcher (in our lab we study inherited forms of macular degneration), so my mom went with an eye for the subject matter in this quilt.  We both liked the storm-at-sea -- eye of the storm -- eyeball connection.

Shannon's Eye of the Storm.  70" x 70" (c) 2010 Vicki Conley.  Hanging at the 2011 Dallas Quilt Festival

She designed the quilt so that there are curved rays radiating from the center of the eye, and each ray has storm at sea blocks pieced into it.  She hand drafted each storm at sea block to fit into the curved block spaces in the rays and chose subtly shifting shades of cream-brown-white for the sclera in order to suggest the spherical curvature of the eye.  The black background is a piece of hand dye she made, and the background is quilted with the pattern of the storm at sea block.  The pupil is an immunofluorescent micrograph of a mouse retinal section I took several years ago in which the different neurons responsible for transmitting visual signals from the eye through to the brain are labeled in red, green, and blue.  She printed the image on fabric and then added beading to emphasize the cells.

Before becoming an artist, my mom was a scientist, and still retains a love for scientific/geometrical/biological things.  This quilt wound up being the first in what I think of as her anatomical quilt series, which now has several other entries.  I was recently lucky enough to move into a small office with a large-ish wall, so now the fabulous eyeball quilt (as I call it) has a permanent home amongst other eyeball lovers!

I hope you enjoy!  Do any of you quilt with family and friends?  My mom and I have so much fun quilting, designing and brainstorming together- it's really wonderful to have someone to bounce ideas off of.