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 ...