Sweet River Studios

I posted about the quilt borders a few days ago by accident. I meant to post the center panel part 3 first but oh well. It's okay. Just pretend you didn't read about the borders first. A few months ago, I decided to finish my center panel. I wasn't certain if I was going to thread paint it or not. It's a nice painting and I really didn't want to screw it up because its a really big panel to have to re-create. But all the other animals are thread painted or at least the backgrounds are but I had some reservations about thread painting the rhino. When I used the white ink I had (like for the polar bear) it was a lot more opaque and dried harder than the other inks. So when I tried to thread paint over it it looked like giant holes where punched through the paint which looked really bad. So I avoided thread painting on white areas or ink mixed with white. And the rhino has some white on it and mixed with other colors so I was concerned it was going to look really b...

I've gotten a lot of my Animal Quilt done and I'm ready to begin the borders. I had this grand idea to make the borders 10" wide and make one with an arctic, savannah and jungle theme with additional paintings of animals but this seemed really daunting to me for some reason. Maybe because they're quite large? I didn't want to screw them up and have to start over? I dunno, but for whatever reason I was dreading doing them. I am really struggling to get excited about them. They're big, complicated animal/nature scenes and I'm worried about them. Period. Just worried about them. I also keep going back to the footprint theme. I thought before I would have footprints that would fade away as the animal progressed showing that the animal is disappearing. Then I thought I would simply put the footprints of the animals on the back of the quilt. At least they would be somewhere, right? After sleeping on the problem, I thought I should figure out something else fo...

Since River likes scent work, I decided we should try barn hunting. There's a bit more of a "hunt" feel to it, since she really has to search little hidey holes, dig through loose straw and of course climb over bales of straw. We've completed 2 trials now and she seems to enjoy it. We've gotten a few qualifying ribbons, a third and first place ribbon, a High in Class and of course a title ribbon. And just like with the ribbons she's gotten for scent work, I decided to put together a Barn Hunt ribbon board. My ribbon boards are simple foam core and this one happens be a gold color. And since I still have some paw print scrapbooking paper and paw print stickers from decorating the scent work board, I went ahead and used them. I found some beige colored ribbon with chocolate paw prints on it and of course I founds some little cat nip mice. I used my Cameo Silhouette to cut out the letters for each level and decorated the corners with the paw prints ribbon. ...

River and I participated in our second barn hunt trial on October 31 and November 1 at Columbus All Breed. She seemed to really enjoy the barn hunt in Marysville at Anything Goes for Dogs and this one was no different. We entered at the Novice level and after 1 successful rat hunt, we moved up to Open. We had a time of 1:27 for our 3rd leg of the Novice title. Not bad at all. The second trial we moved up to Open and it's basically the same as Novice but you find 2 rats instead of 1. River searched the area really well but unfortunately, she only found 1 rat at the 2:30 mark which means we were out of time. So no ribbon for that run but that's okay. She was doing well searching everything but she just didn't hit on the right area. On Sunday, November 1, we entered into 2 trials. Both were at the Open level. River is used to alerting to a scent when she's on the ground level. Here she has to try to alert to the rat when she's balancing on a wiggly straw bale up ...

Every day our lives are packed with stress. We are constantly bombarded with news and its usually horrific or shocking from around the world. It's some kind of disaster (natural or otherwise), people being murdered, sold, abused, neglected or tortured. It seems the human race can and does on a regular basis sink further and further to new levels of violence on a daily basis and between TV, computers, radio and smartphones we are constantly hearing all about it. So we need to find a way to focus our minds on something simple and block out all the garbage and let our minds find some peace. Even tasks such as crochet, knitting or video games takes a certain amount of concentration. If these tasks are fairly routine for your brain and is soothing or calming to you, by all means have a go. But there's another way to "zone out" and turn off your brain. Coloring. Adult coloring books are all the rage right now. Amazon will frequently indicate a coloring book for adults i...