Getting ahead of myself

I decided to use this weekend to skip ahead a bit in the In Flight quilt-along, in an attempt to have the whole thing finished a few weeks ahead of schedule, and avoid that nasty clash with the start of semester.  Having not participated in a quilt-along before, I’m not sure what the ettiquette is here, whether I’m supposed to post pictures of the birds when it’s not the official week to be making them, but I’m working on the theory that hardly anyone from that part of the internet reads my blog anyway, so it shouldn’t ruffle anyone’s feathers 🙂 too much.
So, seagulls:
Tartankiwi provided two different patterns for the seagull in the pattern pack (because she wasn’t entirely happy with the first version so made a second), the idea being you just pick one of them to include in the 12 birds of your quilt.  But me being me, I’m going to have all 13 birds in my quilt (I’ll just say one’s a black-backed gull and the other’s a red-billed gull).  I *think* I’ve worked out how I can fit them all in…


Although I liked how this second gull turned out, the pattern wasn’t up to Tartankiwi’s usual standards.  I don’t know if it was because it was a last-minute decision to include both patterns in the package, so she didn’t test it as thoroughly as usual, but there were a couple of what seemed to be mistakes in the pattern, and a couple of places where I think she could have made the pattern work better by doing it slightly differently.  But it still looks cool, and that’s the main thing.
I was going to attempt to get another bird or two done today, but it’s getting very warm, so I may end up abandoning my sewing machine in favour of reading a good book under a shady tree…