Cockatoo wallhanging

I love this glass mosaic featured in Kafe Fassett's book 'Glorious Inspiration'. I decided to use it for my first adventure in thread painting after reading Ellen Anne Eddy's 'Thread Magic'. The gold leadlighting would be really easy to reproduce in gold metallic thread. I also liked that each feather could be coloured in separately, breaking down the task of blending colours for the bird into small steps. Each feather had at most about four colours of thread so it didn't seem like a huge task.


I scanned in the image and then just used Paint to manipulate it to something that was simplified but still a pleasing composition. I was going to make up the background with a light diamond behind the cockatoo and darker triangles in the corners. The black lines were to help me see how that was going to look. But in the end I liked the background fabric too much to cut off the corners!



The finished piece. The image is reversed because I traced the image and then worked from the back. I didn't mind which way round the final piece was facing so I didn't bother reversing the image before I traced it.