Sweet River Studios

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 ...

This is my third photo mat I've decorated. It's 16x20" so its rather large and took me a while. This one is white and I used a darker bronze colored ribbon with a gold design on it. I quilled flowers in a gold and purple and leaves and vines in green. I also made a cute little butterfly to rest on some flowers. The large beige flowers were cut out of a cotton lace ribbon design. And since the opposite corners were really empty looking, I added some pearlized gem designs that I found in the scrapbooking section of the craft store. I didn't add as much bling around since I had large gems in the opposite corners. I think this would look great for a senior prom picture who's colors were purple and gold, a wedding photo or any really any picture.

I've started another photo mat quilling project. This mat is a cream color and I put it in landscape position instead of portrait like the first one. I've got a lot of blue and dark green colors along with brown and some white in this one. I've got another gold and white ribbon which shows up nicely on the cream background.  I made it go out to the edges of the mat and it looks like the ribbon is coming around from the back. There was cute little burlap looking daisy bunches in the wedding section of Joanns and I thought they would be a nice addition. I just snipped off the florist wire and glued it down. I think it needed some more green vines but other than that I think it turned out well.