Enabler

ot home last night and found a parcel waiting for me in my letterbox.  Even better, it was a parcel full of fabric!  Mum had texted me the other day to say that a craft shop near her was having a closing down sale, and did I want her to see if she could get me some of those “fat quarter” things that her friends who know about quilting keep talking about?  So of course I said yes please, and then completely forgot about the conversation until the parcel arrived.  Excellent choices, Mum!

The owls are very cute and full of possibilities, but I think my favourite might be the dark blue one – it has quite a subtle print of pocket watches and feels very Dr Who-y (hmmm, paper pieced Tardis?…). And I’m already working out where the others will fit into this latest project.
Speaking of which, finished my first bird last night:

It’s not my favourite of the 13 bird patterns, but I think it will look better once it’s in context with all of the others.  And I messed up the head a bit, with that darker blue area – I’d intended to get an area of the fabric that was closer in colour to the other fabrics, but I must have moved it while I was sewing it or something and got the dark bit instead.
Actually, I’m wondering if I’ve possibly been a bit too random with the fabric choices – looking at other people’s “scrappy” paper-piecing, I suspect they’re actually very careful about which fabrics go where, whereas I just picked them according to the size of scrap I had compared to the size of the pattern piece.  I’m not sure now whether for the next bird I want to be more careful, or if I’ll just stick with the randomness – might be interesting so see what the effect is like when I’ve got loads of birds done this way (or it might be a very expensive failure).