Cardinals - Final

This piece will be hard mounted on a frame.
If I don't have to ship them......they can have the royal treatment.
One day to paint them and one day to finish them. I wish everything I did was so straight forward.

Birdie, Birdie in a Tree

I decided last night to tackle some of the birds and get them off my to-do list.
The Cardinals are the only ones in a pair.

After trimming them carefully, I auditioned them on a few backgrounds. In the end, I knew I wanted them against the sky, but not a plain blue sky, and not a cheater sky with clouds. Two minutes of staring at my shelf of hand dyed/painted FQ, one caught my eye.

(It hasn't been there that long but it was the devil to iron all the creases out. Perhaps the paint increases the sharpness of the fold?)

After making a "branch" from twisted wool, I auditioned several positions for these two. As silly as it seems the concept of dominance crept into my head. Is the position on the branch purposeful? or chance? ( Too much time reading about political correctness.)

Male Cardinal's head is obscured

Too much space between them

Too crowded

JUST RIGHT!

In the end I'm going with the one I like..... this last one!

1:30 pm

Couching the branch was quick. I straighten it a bit as the "corkscrew hazel" look was too unnatural looking.

I decided to go with a Spring theme, the buds just bursting. It took me a while to decide how to add that touch of red that most trees show when they are first coming alive. A little piece of maroon cheesecloth did the trick.

Small triangles of green fabric rolled and tucked into the stem gave me bursting buds.

A small piece of batting behind each bird, rounds their bellies a bit. Stitching them down will be the last thing I do today.

Birch Trees - Version 2 - Final

Version 2

This came together much faster than I expected, always a bonus.

I included a closeup of the lower area, the finish for the ground. I tried something a little different, I used shrub stems instead of grasses and a much more liberal application of cheese cloth.

Why does finishing this style, a confetti or crumb method, takes so much effort? The stitching is tiny. Here's a shot of the reverse. Those are inch markings on the base fabric. And this piece is 28x40. It may have been faster to use a tiny meander but the leaf pattern is in keeping with the theme.

This version is a little bigger than the original. I will bind it in a similar fashion.

It's always interesting to see the difference, even though you start and work with the exact the same image. 

Version 1

Birch Trees - Day 7, 8 and 9

Well it's about a month until the show in TO and I still have 3 pieces in my head plus the 6 birds I thread painted last month.
Enough of this " Oh look...it's Spring"  nonsense.

There wasn't a reason to post the last few days of hours of sewing because I slowly worked down the length of the piece inch by inch removing pins as I went.

Doing a quilt and taking a few days off up north was a nice break, but.......

I am now about 10 inches from the bottom.
So it's time to address the bottom.

Using wool as shrub stems, a darker batik for dead leaves and coloured cheesecloth, I'm ready to finish this.
Again, it will be at least two more days of stitching. Fortunately it's going to rain tomorrow.

Finished Quilt - Flowers and Tendrils

It was raining all day, so it was a good day to work on my customer's Quilt,

The majority of the slow work with the custom flowers was completed last week so this was a straight forward job. I did have to redo a small section when the backing didn't lie as flat as I wished, but that's corrected to my satisfaction.

It's a bright quilt. The pattern hides a lot of the work but it shows very well in the darker borders. The pattern in that brown batik was the "go to" for the flower motif in the border and the fill in body of the quilt.