Last year, I took a portrait class at Quilt Trends with Maria Elkins. If you don't know who Maria is, I'd suggest you take a look at her website mariaelkins.com. She's awesome and all should bow down to her and her craftiness. She taught the class on portraits and showed us her method of making portraits out of fabric. My little giraffe came out pretty cute but the quilting really helped it out giving it some extra details. Here's some before/after pictures. So this was the class that got me thinking about making an animal portrait quilt specifically of endangered animals. At first, I thought I could maybe do them as black/white thread art type pictures but discarded that idea fairly quickly. I can't image working with nothing but black thread on white fabric for literally months on end. Then, I thought I could simply do what I did for the giraffe portrait and use fabric. This wasn't a bad idea but I do want to get it done sometime during my lifetime...