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.

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...

After getting the rhino and grasses finished for the center panel, I started working on my tree.  I drew only one limb, a few branches and leaves and the tree trunk.  I quilted the outside lines first then I started in the center of the tree and stitched some curvy lines up and down the tree trunk. Then I continued with wavy lines out the branch. I plan on making some more branches so my tree will look more like a tree. I also want my tree branches to be outside the center panel and out into the sashing areas so that the tree will look much closes to the viewer and give it some "pop." After doing the initial quilting, I colored the tree with my Inktense pencils and the color goes on looking darker since its wet, which is fairly misleading as to what your going to wind up with. I felt the colors were too light and didn't vary in intensity at all, so I went back in with the Tsukineko inks and darkened some areas which really helped. My tree also looks pr...

All the 10x10" animal squares for the quilt are done. I just have to figure out how much/little to quilt them. I've been working on the center panel quilting/painting the tree and leaves but that's for another post. The borders of the quilt are 10" wide and I was going to paint them and include some plants, flowers, animals and maybe an insect or two. I wanted to include the Quetzal bird because he's really colorful and I doubt many people have even heard of it. So I went ahead and painted it. The painting looks okay but this little guy looks more iridescent and the paint just didn't capture his brilliant plumage. So, I decided to try to thread paint it using embroidery thread. I tried to match the colors to what I had in the way of thread and started with a zig zag line in the different areas to stabilize it a bit. I don't have any stabilizer ironed to the back of this and I probably should have.  I started with the yellow a...

I have to admit I really like how this one turned out.  I was thinking "oh good lord another gray blob to paint and have to make it look good" so needless to say I wasn't thinking this would turn out well. And since the manatee lives in tropical water, I went for aqua blues and greens for the background.  I started by roughly outlining the animal in gray and adding darker grays and some browns for shading. I kept adding darker colors to add shape to the animal and white to highlight skin folds and sunlight. The background looked kinda drab so I added some water leafy things to add interest. Overall, it definitely looks like a manatee enjoying a swim.