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Animal Quilt - Quilting the Animals

I'm almost finished with the animal portraits and in between I've been thinking about how to enhance them with quilting or thread painting.

I decided to start with the Hyacinth Macaw first. He's a pretty iridescent bird and I'm sure my embroidery thread will help out the picture a lot. I have to be really careful though. The more I thread paint the picture the more likely I'll over do it and it will distort the fabric.


I started with the darkest blue areas and gave them direction. Next, I worked with medium blue thread and finally a light blue for the lightest areas. The only thing you have to remember is to blend the colors. You don't want to just stop in the blue area you in if it goes into another shade either light or dark. You want your threads to criss cross into other areas and that way when you look at the over all picture it'll look nice and blended together. Otherwise, you'll have areas that just have hard stops so to speak.



The lighting is off but here's the pictures of the bird side by side. The top left is the painting without thread painting and the bottom one is the one with thread painting and my final portrait for the macaw.  Even though I did a nice over all thread painting, the painting still distorted. It's no longer 10x10" so I'll have get my inks out again and fix it.




Next, I chose the Kakapo to thread paint. I just added some feather type shapes in the body, some on the face and leaf shapes in the background so there's a lot less thread painting and not near the amount of distortion as the parrot or the orangutan.

The orangutan started off well but the more I thread painted the more I realized I had to do the entire monkey, which I really didn't want to do fearing too much distortion. I need to blend in the fur better in a few places and try to take out (gasp!) the large dark area. I don't even know what happened there but I think I totally forgot what I was doing and I was just moving the fabric and filling in the area. The distortion is really, really bad on the orangutan. But I'm going to try to save it and if not then I guess I get to repaint it.

I think some pictures will have either the same or less thread painting then the macaw or the kakapo just to stay safe. I like that the thread painting has provided direction and some shiny to an otherwise dull picture.

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