Sweet River Studios

I decided to get binding that didn't really stand out. I wanted the focus to be on the quilt so I got a complimentary fabric for the binding. I cut my binding on the bias for this quilt given all the curves. That way the fabric will have a little stretch in it. Everything work out fairly well except for joining the ends. I had a bit of trouble and it got really, really frustrating but I finally got it on. Memo to me - practice binding! I machine stitch my binding on the front and hand stitch it to the back. I don't hand stitch very often so I take this time to brush up on my hand stitching skills and I find it very soothing. So after fighting with the binding a little peaceful sewing is called for. Now, I just need to add a label and call it done.

I finished quilting the bird and background areas, which took me about 4-5 days working in 2 hour shifts. I'm not one of the those people who can sit and quilt for hours on end. My shoulders usually hurt and my brain gets tired and I start to make too many mistakes. So I work in bursts. I quilted a vine/flower motif in the background and then I just quilted a meander filler stitch around those. Now, to find the right binding.

In part 2, I posted a picture of the quilt with a piece of clear vinyl laid on top. I tested out various quilting designs by drawing on it with dry erase markers. Trying to figure out the quilting designs for this quilt has been rather hard. I guess the colored pencil drawings are making it hard. Do I quilt them or not? I'm no longer debating about it. I've decided to quilt the portraits. It'll be a challenge but I think every quilt you do you should give you at least one challenge. So far I've not really had one for this particular quilt so there it is. I just hope I have enough thread colors. I've also added a German Shepard to the quilt. Grandma really, really loved her dog and never got another shepard. She's had other dogs since then but she never talks about them, just her shepard. It's not an exact portrait of her dog but she'll love it just the same. I've been gathering some additional quilting threads this last week and I'm goin...

Well it's taken me forever to continue posting about this quilt. I wanted to add a wash of color to the quilt to soften the glaring white fabric but I lost my inks. I looked for several weeks and had to continue posting about my other applique quilt project in the mean time. That quilt has had a serious set back and I'm really not happy about it or with my self since it was totally my fault. Of course it was my fault! I'm the one making the darn thing. Anyway, I still can't find my inks, so I finally broke down at the end of June and purchased the ink that I know I have lurking in my house somewhere. I'm pleased to say that I got the ink wash on last week. It really helped to blend the colored portraits together. I also got the edges a little darker. When applying the inks, I was trying to only blend so far into the portraits. They have white areas that I did not want to color and if the ink gets to the white area it's not going to come out and it m...

I finished the 50th Anniversary quilt for my parents in February and I've taken a few weeks off to think about my next art quilt project. I usually find inspiration by picking a subject first, then I consider what else I can put on the quilt. I decided my next subject would be my grandmother. She will be 88 in April and she's my last remaining grandparent. She's a really kind woman and I'm glad she's been in my life so I thought I'd do something special. Since I made a colored pencil portrait of my parents, I thought I'd do the same for this quilt. So I went through all the family photos and picked a few pics of my grandma that looked nice. I picked one from when she was a teenager, one with her holding a great-grandchild and one with her with some flowers she got on Mother's Day. Grandma loves birds, flowers, Ohio State football, has no sweet tooth to speak of, has always weighed 127 lbs. her entire life and loves everyone she meets. Since I can...

After I got the backgrounds painted on my portraits, I decided to take my practice portrait and try to put a light wash of black on dad's jacket so the pencil lines would blend in a bit more. That went horribly wrong. I had black ink seep into the bride's veil and into the white collar and in his boutonniere. I also added tulle to the veil and thread painting to the dress.  After all that, I don't think it really did anything for the picture, which was a bit surprising for me. I also forgot to fix the neckline of the dress. I needed to find the center and flip the left side to the right to make it even. I could only see one side in the picture and forgot to make the other side the same. Again, I'm glad this one is just practice. I also started to define the tiara on mom's head piece. The picture basically showed a white blob. There was no definition whatsoever and I had a hard time seeing even the basic shape. So I basically made it up using seed beads. This was...

I haven't done any portrait work in a really long time and I'm glad some of the things I learned came roaring back to me as I worked on these. I did this picture using nothing but colored pencil and it turned out well since I had a bit of practice on the first 2. This one is much better looking and is a fairly good likeness. I think it'll get a bit better after I get the white veil/dress/tiara and the background tinted. Dad doesn't look quite so alien like, which is always a bonus! The streaky look of the color pencils though are really bothering me. Especially in dad's black jacket. I'll continue trying to smooth those out and if that doesn't help then I may put on a light wash of black ink to try to smooth it out. Unfortunately, dad's mouth/lip area isn't all that good but it looks fairly accurate compared to the picture. I think it was a perfect storm so to speak. He's leaning slightly towards mom, head turned towards the camera, ...

I cut several squares of 20x20" in cream and white fabrics. I'm going to try a few different ways of doing this portrait of my parents and one will definitely be a "practice" square. I took the picture I selected and started to draw my parents onto a piece of fabric. It was okay for my practice piece but it wasn't working out so well. So I decided to just make life a little easier and I bought a small projector on Amazon. I loaded the picture and within 10 minutes I had mom and dad projected on the wall onto one of my fabric squares and I was tracing an outline. I got 3 sketches done in 15 minutes and all of the proportions were right.  My first portrait was done free hand and it seriously went wrong. Sorry, dad but you turned out kinda alien like. I figured I would just use this one to practice on. Painting with coffee turned out to be quite hard. First of all, you can't just make a cup of coffee and start painting. I guess that would've been jus...