Sweet River Studios

The next animal I'm working on is the Kakapo. This endangered little parrot is just too cute and I thought that since he doesn't have a great deal of detail that he would be another good one to start painting. I forgot to take a picture of the line drawing first but believe me you didn't miss anything. It just looked like a fat weird bowling pin shape with eyes and a beak. This bird is full of greens and yellow. I started with the brightest green color and roughly laying it in avoiding the bright yellow chest and head. Then I added the yellow areas and blending that into the green. Next, I layered some dark green and a greenish brown color to shade some of the beak area. I let this dry for several hours. Next, I added background colors. This little parrot likes to walk on the forest floor so the background is an abstract of greens and browns. After a while, I thought some leaf shapes would look good peaking in from the sides and so I added those.  In the sec...

The next animal portrait for my Animal Quilt is the Orangutan. This portrait is making me nervous. Hair/fur is notoriously hard to draw but I'm hoping this little guy's big eyes and cute smile will be the focus not his hair. I started with rough outline of the little Orang. I started painting the background in abstract greens since he lives in the jungle and added the first layer of skin tone. I added body color and added the facial details. Before it just looked a weird skeleton and was starting to get into my head so I had to fix that. I also added the first hints of fur. I kept adding to the facial features highlight and shading and blending over and over. I'm still not happy with the white ink. It either disappears into your fabric or becomes kind dull.  I also added several more colors of the fur from dark brown to orange to even a bright yellow. I'm still not happy with the eyes or the hand but I think he turned out okay.

I've been playing around with the new paints I bought. My practice/learning piece is the Amur Leopard. Not that it matters what animal it is because I'm just learning how these paints work. I'm pleased to say that the fabric has remained soft even after using the paint and extender Ink Potion No. 9. so that's a win. The paints also go on MUCH darker and lighten as they dry. I can see where I'll have to go over some areas 2-3 times to get the right shade.  I'm also mixing colors a bit to get the right color hue so we'll see how that works out. I can also see where I maybe working on 2-3 pictures at one time. If you add another color or layer down and your fabric is still just slightly wet then it will bleed everywhere.  Not good. So there's going to have to be drying time accounted for during this process. My leopard is a nice golden beige but all the paints I have are no where near tan, golden or anything resembling the color of leopard fur...

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...

I've been perusing several food blogs and came across several and I decided that I would pick a recipe from these blogs and try them out myself. This recipe comes from Chocolate Moosey. If you click here it will take you the Chocolate Moosey website recipe for Baked Vanilla Doughnuts but I warn you. This website is like five kinds of awesome so be prepared. The recipe reminds me of a dense vanilla cupcake in doughnut form. It's pretty good but I warn you now. This recipe only made 11 doughnuts for me and the recipe says 9 so you may have to double it if you want to freeze some. I decided my large KitchenAid mixer probably would have a hard time mixing so little ingredients and figured I'd just stir it all together myself. I got my dry and my wet ingredients together. The recipe calls for vanilla bean pods and vanilla extract. I didn't have any vanilla bean pods laying around but that's okay. I use vanilla bean paste which is made from the pods and has lot...

Well, its winter and the weather isn't pleasant so that means its time for a project that I can work on in the evenings away from my machine. I decided I'd work on some applique blocks for the Affairs of the Heart quilt. I prep the squares and grab my batik scraps and get sewing.  I didn't think I was doing a whole lot but I've already got 8 blocks done. This quilt has some sashing between a group of blocks and the large border and I've decided it would pretty to embroider the sashing. The sashing is 1.5" and I'm thinking it should stay that width and not any bigger. I did some testing and I didn't like it wider.  I want to enhance the blocks not detract or under or overwhelm them. Since these blocks have a ton of colors in them an the background is entirely white, I thought I'd find a nice embroidery patterns with flowers and/or heart themes since that's what in the blocks and maybe use a variegated rainbow type thread. So begins the ...