Sweet River Studios

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...

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.

I don't know if many of you have even heard of quilling. You take thin strips of paper and wrap it around a post to get a tight coil then you can either glue it down or let it unroll naturally for a loose coil, shape it then glue it. From the loose coil, you can make flower petals, leaf shapes, graceful scrolls and lots of other shapes. I used to tear strips of paper and wrap them around my pencil while bored to death in middle and high schools listening to lectures on protozoa, balancing chemical equations and who knows what else. Guess I was quilling and didn't know it. I also used to doodle a lot in the margins of my papers while at work trapped in the hell of the 3 hour conference call and now its called Zentangle. Needless to say, high school is a pretty distant memory now but I thought I'd try my hand at quilling once again. I've made some simple coils and designs and took a little help from some pre-made flowers, ribbon and sparklies from Joanns and decorated...