Last burst

emester starts tomorrow, so I was hoping to spend the weekend on a last burst of sewing to get the last two birds done.  But best laid plans and all that – I’m coming down with a cold (not *too* bad so far, but as almost everyone I know has had some variety of nasty lurgy over the past couple of weeks, it may yet be early days), so most of the weekend was spent curled up in front of the fire watching YouTube videos and bad TV, and trying, probably in vain, to shake it off before Monday.
I did have a go at one of the birds, but it really just proves that I shouldn’t try sewing when I’m sick, because apparently the first part of my brain to shut down is my spatial awareness.  Not only was I constantly making mistakes that required unpicking and resewing seams (usually because I had the fabric upside down – a real rookie mistake), or patching bits where the fabric didn’t end up lined up properly (you can see it on the tip of one of the feathers), but I also managed to totally reverse the way I’d planned to have the colours go on the bird (a wren, by the way) – my mind just wasn’t capable of thinking in mirror images today!

Which wouldn’t be the end of the world, except that I’d planned on combining the three birds so the colours flowed between them, and now that’s not going to work, unless I turn it upside down (hmm, I wonder if wrens ever fly upside down? They’re small birds, aren’t they? I wonder if they’re like fantails that flit and loop all over the place when they’re flying, and quite possibly do end up flying upside down occasionally…) or just start all over again and sew a new wren (which I really don’t want to do, because those wings took forever!).  A pity, because despite my mistakes it turned out looking quite nice.
Oh well, maybe by the time I get round to making the third bird I’ll have come up with a solution (or at least the motivation to start again…)